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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 ...
Riggs, Ransom
(1979- ) US author whose Young Adult Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children sequence, beginning with Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children (2011) [for further details see Checklist below], smoothly juxtaposes fantasy and Alternate World topoi in a long narrative depicting the trials and tribulations of young Jacob Portman, his disrupted family, Miss Peregrine across the Atlantic ...
Ultrawave
A once fairly common item of sf Terminology, denoting Imaginary Science radio-like Communications operating Faster Than Light. This sf coinage seems to have been first used in Lester del Rey's "Habit" (November 1939 Astounding); it appears in E E Smith's ...
Stangerup, Henrik
(1937-1998) Danish journalist, playwright and author who worked mainly within the tradition of "new realism" prevalent in Denmark during the 1960s; he also wrote historical fiction. His sf novel Manden der ville vaere skyldig (1973; trans David Gress-Wright as The Man Who Wanted to Be Guilty 1982) is a Satire assaulting the Dystopian welfare state and the Social Democratic party through a ...
Gay, J Drew
(1846-1890) UK journalist, politician, explorer and author in whose The Mystery of the Shroud: A Tale of Socialism (1887) a fog gives a socialist secret society the chance to conquer England in the Near Future, but the chance is muffed. [JC]
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 ...