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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.
Site updated on 25 July 2024
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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 ...
Collas, Phil
Working name of Australian author Felix Edward Collas (1907-1989), whose only sf work, The Inner Domain (October 1935 Amazing; 1989 chap), is a kind of Lost Race tale, in which aboriginal Australians, millennia ago, discovered relics of an ancient civilization Underground, which they are still inhabiting in 1981. [JC]
Ruff, Matt
(1965- ) US author whose first novel, Fool on the Hill (1988), a fantasy set on a magic-irradiated college campus, was much influenced by previous models – some cited in the text – from John Crowley to Thomas Pynchon. His second, Sewer, Gas, and Electric: The Public Works Trilogy (1996), is an Equipoisal gonzo sf novel set in ...
Bolaño, Roberto
Working name of Chilean journalist, poet and author Roberto Bolaño Avalos (1953-2003), who was garlanded with awards for works largely outside the sf genre (see Mainstream Writers of SF). Most of his short fiction skirts the fantastic, though his Beast Fable, "El policia de las ratas" (in El gaucho insufrible, coll 2003; trans Chris Andrews as "Police Rat" in The Insufferable Gaucho 2010), ...
Snedeker, Caroline Dale
(1871-1956) US author, initially of children's books, some of them depicting life in versions of New Harmony, the town of her birth being named after the communitarian Utopia New Harmony created by her grandfather Robert Owen (1771-1858). Seth Way: A Romance of the New Harmony Community (1917) is a fictionalized (and fantasticated) biography of an experimental Scientist and early resident of New Harmony, Indiana, which had ...
Langford, David
(1953- ) UK author, critic, editor, publisher and sf fan, in the latter capacity recipient of 21 Hugo awards for fan writing – some of the best of his several hundred pieces are assembled as Let's Hear It for the Deaf Man (coll 1992 chap US; much exp vt The Silence of the Langford 1996; exp 2015 ebook) as Dave Langford, edited by Ben Yalow – plus five Best Fanzine Hugos ...