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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 ...
Booth, Pat
(1929-2018) New Zealand newspaper journalist (chiefly with The Auckland Star), local-area politician and author, one of whose sixteen books is sf: Long Night Among the Stars (1961) sensitively depicts the human interactions of the crew of a Spaceship in the Near Future. This author should not be confused with the female Pat Booth (1943-2009) who wrote All for Love (1993), a medical fantasy ...
Bade, William L
(1928-2005) US academic, physicist (he did work for NASA) and author, who began publishing Hard SF stories with "Advent" for Astounding in January 1948, beginning a short series ending with "The Eight Hundredth Hundred-Day" (Fall 1953 Fantastic Worlds). He wrote three other stories, none remarkable. [JC]
King, Godfré Ray
Pseudonym of US mining engineer and Theosophist (see Theosophy) Guy Warren Ballard (1878-1939), whose doctrines – he became the Messenger of the Prophet Saint Germain on a mountain in California in 1930 – were rendered in fictional form as The Magic Presence (1935), a Lost Race tale in which Lemurians are discovered Underground beneath Mount Shasta, and ...
Day Mars Invaded Earth, The
Film (1962). API/Twentieth Century Fox. Directed by Maury Dexter. Written by Harry Spalding. Cast includes Betty Beall, Lowell Brown, William Mims, Gregg Shank, Kent Taylor and Marie Windsor. 70 minutes. Black and white. / Scientist David Fielding (Taylor), with the help of associate Web Spenser (Mims), has overseen the pioneering landing of the first unmanned probe on Mars, which emitted a strange radio beam before becoming ...
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 ...