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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 ...
Bien, H M
(1831-1895) German-born rabbi and author, in the US from an early age; his book of poems, Oriental Legends and Other Poems (coll 1883), contains some fantasy content. Of sf interest is Ben-Beor: A Story of the Anti-Messiah. In Two Divisions (1891; vt Ben-Beor: A Historical Story. In Two Divisions 1892), the first division of which involves a journey to the Moon by Elijah in a fiery chariot, the second of which engages with a ...
Noon, Jeff
(1957- ) UK author whose first publications as an sf writer comprise the Vurt sequence comprising Vurt (1993; exp as coll 2013), Pollen (1995), Automated Alice (1996) and Nymphomation (1997), all set in various versions of a Near-Future Manchester irradiated by Cyberpunk marriages of the human and non-human, all tales being told in a ...
Stivers, Carole
(? - ) US biochemist and author The Mother Code (2020), set in a Near Future world devastated by a Pandemic originating as an unintended consequence of experiments in biowarfare, and other Disasters. The planet is so poisoned that the only chance for the survival of Homo sapiens seems to be the implantation of ...
Gibson, Gary
(1965- ) Scots author who began publishing work of genre interest with "Mother Love" for Skeleton Crew in March 1991, and whose first novel, Angel Stations (2004), neatly follows the pattern of the "new Space Opera", the kind of baroquely expansive tale which exfoliated in the late twentieth century and whose most comprehensive example may be Dan Simmons's Hyperion Cantos (omni ...
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 ...