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Saturday 27 July 2024
Welcome to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Fourth Edition. Some sample entries appear below. Click here for the Introduction; here for the masthead; here for Acknowledgments; here for the FAQ; here for advice on citations. Find entries via the search box above (more details here) or browse the menu categories in the grey bar at the top of this page.
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Arthur C Clarke Award
This award has been given since 1987 for the best sf novel whose UK first edition was published during the previous calendar year, and consists of an inscribed bookend and a sum of money from a grant initially donated by Arthur C Clarke. In 2001 the prize money – until then a constant £1000 – was increased to £2001 as a gesture to 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968); it has since risen by ...
Wessells, Henry
(1960- ) US antiquarian bookseller, editor, small press publisher and author who began to publish sf outside the genre with "Virtual Wisdom" for Exquisite Corpse in 1992, a literary journal edited by Andrei Codrescu, and within the genre with "From This Swamp" in The Starry Wisdom (anth 1994) edited by D M Mitchell. In 1993, he encountered the work of Avram Davidson and began to compile bibliographical information ...
Pace, Sue
(? - ) US author of The Last Oasis (1993), a Young Adult tale set in a Near Future world that has suffered calamitous Climate Change after long decades of environmental destruction; the young protagonists flee their precarious Keep – a shopping mall in Portland, Oregon – in the direction of Idaho, where the ...
Hirschfeld, Burt
(1923-2004) US author, notably of some crime novels set in Florida; Gas!; Or, It Became Necessary to Destroy the World in Order to Save It (1970) novelizes the Roger Corman film Gas-s-s-s, Or It Became Necessary to Destroy the World ... (1970). [JC]
Volney, M
(1757-1820) French philosopher, traveller and author; he adopted the name Volney, a contraction of Voltaire and Ferney (a French commune), which became his title. After initial travels to the Middle East, and the publication of books describing his responses, he deepened his contemplation of the world in Les Ruines, ou méditation sur les révolutions des empires (1791; trans anon as ...
Clute, John
(1940- ) Canadian critic, editor and author, in the UK from 1969; married to Judith Clute from 1964, partner of Elizabeth Hand since 1996. He began to publish work of genre interest with an sf-tinged poem "Carcajou Lament" in Triquarterly for Winter 1960 [ie Autumn 1959]; he began consistently publishing sf reviews in his "New Fiction" column for the Toronto Star (1966-1967), and later in ...