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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 ...
Cultural Engineering
A phrase not especially common in sf Terminology, although what it refers to is fundamental to the genre. The idea of humans deliberately altering the nature of alien cultures (or of Aliens doing it to us), or indeed of doing the same to isolated cultures on Earth or colony worlds, is often evoked in sf – sometimes approvingly, slightly more often disapprovingly. This is especially so in stories in which ...
Evans, David
(? - ) US author of whom nothing is known – the name may be a pseudonym – whose Time Station sequence of routine Changewar tales, beginning with Time Station London (1996), pits the Temporal Corps against various threats, in World War Two and elsewhen, against the proper order of history; Alternate Histories flicker in ...
Myers, John J
(1941-2020) US Catholic cleric, ultimately Archbishop of Newark 2001-2016, who collaborated with his friend (since childhood) Gary K Wolf on the short story "The Unhardy Boys in Outer Space" (in Amityville House of Pancakes, Volume 3, anth 2006, ed Pete S Allen) using the pseudonym Jehane Baptiste; the tale is set on the International Space Station. His second collaboration with Wolf, this time writing as ...
London, Jack
Working name of US author John Griffith London (1876-1916), known primarily for his work outside the sf field. After leaving school at the age of 14, London spent seven years of adventure and hardship as an oyster pirate, sailor, hobo, prisoner and Klondike gold-seeker. During this period, he gave himself an education steeped in the most influential scientific and philosophic theories of the late nineteenth century – Darwinism (see Evolution; ...
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 ...