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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 ...
Waters, Stone
(? - ) Canadian doctor and author whose sf novel The Terraformers (1996) focuses on the moral dilemmas involved in Terraforming. [JC]
Machines
Sf is sometimes considered, especially by its detractors, to be a genre in which machines are more important than people. Definitions of SF often deny this, but the assumption that only Hard SF, dealing with the future of Technology, can be "real" sf is very common. Various kinds of machine have exerted a powerful fascination upon the sf imagination, and the social impact of technology has been a ...
Miller, Jon de Burgh
(? - ) UK author associated almost exclusively with the Doctor Who universe, for which he has written several Ties, including Doctor Who: The New Adventures: Bernice Summerfield: Twilight of the Gods (1999) with Mark Clapham and Doctor Who: Dying in the Sun (2001). He also contributed Time Hunter: Deus Le Volt (2006) to the Time Hunter sequence. ...
Roberts, Tony
Working name of British artist Anthony Roberts (1950- ), occasionally bylined thus but more often credited as Tony Roberts. After receiving artistic training at Wolverhampton College of Art from 1967 to 1969, and at Ravensbourne College of Art from 1969 to 1972, he almost immediately began painting sf book covers. While his first two covers – for a 1973 edition of Ralph Blum's The Simultaneous Man (1970) and a 1973 ...
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 ...