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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 ...
Bellow, Saul
(1915-2005) Canadian-born US author, winner of the 1976 Nobel Prize for Literature, and generally thought of as the premier Mainstream novelist of his generation in the US. Some of his books distantly resemble sf, specifically Henderson the Rain King (1959), a picaresque partly set in a quasimythical African kingdom. Mr Sammler's Planet (1970) has been wrongly annexed as sf by several ...
Valliant, Paul
(? - ) US author whose Near Future thriller Copula Deception (2015) is set in New York. A stock market scandal, on investigation by the police-captain protagonist, proves to be a skin concealing dangerous Genetic Engineering, which in turn segues into American interventions in African states. [JC]
Axler, James
A House Name used by the Gold Eagle Books division of Harlequin Enterprises Ltd – Harlequin also published the Laser Books series in the 1970s – for various series, three of them of sf interest, two of these being extremely long. Deathlands (over 120 volumes) begins as a Ruined Earth sequence set 100 years after nuclear war has terminated civilization in 2001 in a ...
Trancers
Film (1984; vt Future Cop). Lexyn/Empire. Produced and directed by Charles Band. Written by Danny Bilson, Paul DeMeo. Cast includes Helen Hunt, Michael Stefani and Tim Thomerson. 76 minutes. Colour. / Band apparently learned from his early, mostly bad movies, for this small film is confident, stylish sf. Future cop Jack Deth (Thomerson) travels back from 2247 CE to present-day Los Angeles in search of dangerous mystic Whistler (Stefani), who ...
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 ...