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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 ...
Butor, Michel
(1926-2016) French critic and author, principally known as a leading exponent of the nouveau roman. Butor was one of the first mainstream and academic critics to consider sf seriously according to the same standards as general literature. He published an invigorating analysis of Jules Verne as early as 1949, and examined the dilemmas and future potential of the field in his penetrating study, "La crise de croissance de la SF" (1953); this was first ...
Apes as Human
The heading for this entry should be seen as a rough short-hand designation for a subject whose nature is diffuse and has changed constantly over the centuries; in the second edition of this encyclopedia (1993) our remit for what was then entitled Apes and Cavemen (in the Human World) may have been unwieldy, as we used the term "cavemen" to designate subject matter that might have fitted better into other entries: mainly proto-human races, including Neanderthals, though without taking a ...
Champetier, Joël
(1957-2015) French-Canadian author who began publishing work of genre interest with "Le Chemin des Fleurs" ["The Way of the Flowers"] in Solaris for October 1981, and who published several sf and fantasy novels of interest in French from 1990. La Taupe et le Dragon (1990; rev 1999; trans Jean-Louis Trudel as The Dragon's Eye 1999) is set on a colony world founded and run by Chinese from a Hong Kong-like enclave; the complex plot ...
Bear, Elizabeth
Working name of Sarah Bear Elizabeth Wishnevsky (1971- ), US author who began publishing work of genre interest with "e e 'doc' cummings" for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in March 2003, and who has released at least fifty stories since; she won the 2005 John W Campbell Award for best new writer, and the Hugo award for "Shoggoths in Bloom" (March 2008 ...
Robinson, Roger
(1943- ) UK computer programmer, bibliographer and publisher, active in UK Fandom for many years. The Writings of Henry Kenneth Bulmer (1983 chap; rev 1984 chap) is an exhaustive Bibliography of one of the most prolific sf writers, Kenneth Bulmer, and Who's Hugh?: An SF Reader's Guide to Pseudonyms (1987) is similarly exhaustive in its ...