SF Encyclopedia Home Page
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.
Site updated on 25 July 2024
Sponsor of the day: The League of Fan Funds
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 ...
Turenne, Raymond
Working name of French diplomat, banker and author Raymond Auzias-Turenne (1861-1940), in Canada from 1890; he also wrote as by Amès Sémiré. Of sf interest is Le dernier mamouth (1904 as Raymond Auzias de Turenne; trans as The Last of the Mammoths 1907), in which the eponymous survivor is hunted down in its despoiled Lost World. [JC]
Halberstam, Michael J
(1932-1980) US medical doctor and author whose The Wanting of Levine (1978) depicts a Near Future US presidential campaign which ends in the 1988 election of the Jewish politician Levine, whose wry wisdom may bring the nation back from the violent civil strife that has already begun to balkanize the land. Halberstam was murdered by a burglar whom he had surprised on returning home with his wife. [JC]
Lindsay, Kathleen
(1903-1973) Extremely prolific author born in the UK but latterly of Somerset West, Cape Province, South Africa; she also lived in India, New Zealand, and Egypt, finally settling in South Africa in the late 1940s. In quantity and quality her output ranks with that of John Creasey and Lauran Paine; many of her supposed 904 books were routine romances or crime thrillers. Most of her sf appeared under the ...
Weir, Andy
(1972- ) US author who has also written as by Jack Sharp and has self-published fiction at his Galactanet site [see links below] since 2009. His first novel, The Martian (2014), initially self-published as a free online ebook in 2012, describes in considerable detail the travails of an astronaut stranded on Mars as fellow-Scientists work out a way to rescue him. His survival techniques include ...
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 ...