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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 ...
Ford, Jeffrey
(1955- ) US teacher and author, most of whose work has been fantasy and horror (but see Horror in SF), though his intimately knowledgable and sophisticated use of the toolkits of Fantastika make it impossible to affix any dominant label to his oeuvre; his tales, mostly narrated by an immanent and sometimes visible Ford-like story-teller, permeate and are permeated by the conversant web (or mycelium) of the ...
Storm Watch
Film (2002; vt Code Hunter, Virtual Storm). Cinetel Films Inc. Directed by Terry Cunningham. Written by Cunningham, Flavia Carrozzi. Cast includes Ling Bai, Nick Cornish, Vanessa Marcil and Adrian Paul. 96 minutes. Colour. / An AI (Paul) capable of controlling the weather (see Weather Control) via satellites gets loose and decides to destroy civilization. It is foiled by a clever hacker and games player ...
Bishop, William Henry
(?1843-? ) US author – apparently not William Henry Bishop (1847-1928) – whose Utopia, The Garden of Eden, U.S.A.: A Very Possible Story (1895), posits an equable world, with equality between the sexes. [JC]
Byron, Lord
Working name and title of UK poet George Gordon Noel Byron (1788-1824), the central figure – along with Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats (1795-1821) – in the second generation of English Romantic poets; father of Ada Lovelace. At least as directly as did Shelley in Prometheus Unbound (1820), and perhaps more accessibly, he expressed throughout his career a volatile but persistent sense that ...
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 ...