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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 ...
White, Nathanial
(1983- ) US author whose first novel, the Near Future Conscious Designs (2022), explicitly employs his own experience of accident-caused paralysis and recovery of bodily functions in an exploration of the state of mind of a paraplegic offered the chance to desubstantiate himself into a "Second Self" in a Virtual Reality Utopia. [JC]
Zoo
A Zoo is an enclosure whose inmates are not allowed to leave and who may be observed at will. With the possible exceptions of the ghetto, the quarantine and the Prison, the Zoo thus defined can be distinguished from other enclosed venues, real or imagined: from the wildlife preserve, the Keep, the Island, the circus, the reservation, the Garden City, the Utopia or ...
Knausgaard, Karl Ove
(1968- ) Norwegian author, who does not normally use the Norwegian spelling of his surname, Knausgård, for translated works; best-known for the sustained, multi-volume, dedicatedly nonfantastic, autofictional Min kamp ["My Struggle", echoing Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf (1925)] sequence beginning with Om høsten (2015; trans Martin Aitken as Autumn 2017) [the sequence is not included in ...
Fearing, Kenneth
(1902-1961) US poet and author, who supported himself in early years in part by writing softcore pornography as by Kirk Wolff, and whose early renown as a poet faded perceptibly even before his death; he is now known mainly for mysteries like The Big Clock (1946), a tale whose atmosphere adumbrates the film-noir tonality of later US fantasy. Fearing's only sf novel proper is Clark Gifford's Body (1942), which gravely and literately portrays a ...
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 ...