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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 ...
Meléndez, Francisco
(1941- ) Spanish illustrator and author, perhaps best known for two Steampunk-inflected fables of Invention, each featuring an obsessed tinkerer. El verdadero inventor del Buque Submarino (1989 chap; trans William Dyckes and adapted Robert Morton as The Mermaid and the Major: The True Story of the Invention of the Submarine 1991), which seems to be set in the eighteenth century, ...
Return of the Fly
Film (1959). Associated Producers/Twentieth Century Fox. Directed by Edward L Bernds. Written by Bernds. Cast includes David Frankham, Brett Halsey and Vincent Price. 78 minutes. Black and white. / The first of two sequels to the successful sf/horror film The Fly (1958), the other being Curse of the Fly (1965). Here the son of the scientist in The Fly, after being attacked by an evil ...
Douglass, Ellsworth
Pseudonym of US real-estate speculator, insurance broker and author Elmer Dwiggins (1863-1933), whose enterprises (for which he was jailed in 1919-1920) took him to various countries around the turn of the century; his fiction, including his one sf novel, was written during these travels. His first story, "The Wheels of Dr Ginochio Gyves" (September 1899 Cassell's Magazine) with Edwin Pallander, describes a gyroscopically controlled ...
Kinder, Stephen
(1857-1917) US railwayman and author of Dutch descent. In his sf novel, The Sabertooth: A Romance of Put-In-Bay (1902), a Wandering Jew-like survivor from the last Ice age – his Immortality seemingly caused both by the Cryogenic effect of the ice, and by his wife's curse – haunts Underground caverns beneath the eponymous ...
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 ...