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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 ...
Mandeville, Colin
Pseudonym used by UK economist and author Anthony Dalston Dawson (1927- ) for his novel, The Last Days of New York (1980), in which unbalanced speculative profligacy (see Economics) sufficiently undermines New York for the city to collapse. [JC]
Lunts, Lev N
(1901-1924) Russian playwright, critic, translator and author, founder of the Serapion Brothers, a group of experimentalist authors, whose name he took from E T A Hoffmann's collection of that name. He is of specific sf interest for The City of Truth (trans John Silver from manuscript 1929), in which a surreal search by soldiers for the heart of Mother Russia deposits them in a Utopian City ...
Fail Safe
Film (1964). Max E Youngstein-Sidney Lumet. Directed by Sidney Lumet. Written by Walter Bernstein, based on Fail-Safe (13-27 October 1962 Saturday Evening Post; 1962) by Eugene L Burdick and Harvey Wheeler. Cast includes Henry Fonda, Walter Matthau, Dan O'Herlihy, Frank Overton and Fritz Weaver. 111 minutes. Colour. / A mistaken US nuclear attack on Moscow ...
Zimlich, Jan
(? - ) US author whose first novel, Not Quite Paradise (1995), is a romantic sf tale set in rural America, where crashlanded Aliens establish First Contact with humans, an action which ends in Sex and other involvements. The complicated plotting in Heart's Play (1998) and The Black Rose (2000) encourage a sense that an underlying ...
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 ...