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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 ...
Kagan, Janet
(1946-2008) US author who began publishing sf with "Faith-of-the-Month Club" (1 February 1982 Analog), as by Anon., and who won a 1993 Hugo Best Novelette Award for "The Nutcracker Coup" (December 1992 Asimov's). Her first sf book was a Star Trek Tie, Uhura's Song (1985), reckoned to be one of the better novels attached to that enterprise. Her ...
Walker, David
(1911-1992) Scottish-born soldier and author, permanently in Canada from 1948, naturalized in 1957; best known for sentimental evocations of Scottish spirit like Geordie (1950), later filmed. Winter of Madness (1964) is a Near-Future melodrama with spoof elements, involving a mysterious Invention, all told in a manner modestly evocative of John Buchan; and ...
Duffy, Maureen
(1933- ) UK author several of whose books focus on London, including Capital (1975), a complex set of era-switching meditations – including a Neanderthal man's thoughts about the future – on the deep mythos of the city. The novel influenced (as he has acknowledged clearly) Michael Moorcock's Mother London (1988), and similar later works by Iain ...
Prugovečki, Eduard
(1937-2003) Romanian-born physicist and author, in Canada from 1965; of sf interest are his two Utopias, Memoirs of the Future (2001), which rather abstractly describes a good and a bad world to come, affirming throughout the value of science when applied correctly; and Dawn of the New Man (2002), set in a vaguely-described distant Near Future where the good and the less good are described in terms of an ...
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 ...