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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 ...
Tolstoy, Alexei
(1883-1945) Russian author, sometimes mistakenly thought to have been a distant relative of Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910); he was not in fact a blood relative of the famous Tolstoy, though his mother's second husband was related, and gave Tolstoy his surname. Tolstoy is best known for two books whose first versions appeared in the experimental 1920s and both of which were revised in the decade of terror which followed. Aelita (first version #6 1922-#1-2 1923 Krasnaya Nov' as "Aelita ...
Chilson, Rob
Working name of US author Robert Dean Chilson (1945- ). His first sf story was "The Mind Reader" in Analog for June 1968. Of his novels, which generally fail to step beyond the routine, As the Curtain Falls (1974) is a Far-Future adventure with some highly coloured moments, The Star-Crowned Kings (1975) is a Space Opera about a member of a subject race ...
Wearmouth, Darren A
(? - ) UK author with his brother Marcus Wearmouth of the Activation sequence of Near Future post-Disaster thrillers beginning with First Activation (2011), set initially in a New York dominated by Zombie-like minions of a tyrannical organization bent on reshaping America. Protagonist duties are shared by two ...
Gallego, S G
(1883-1944) Spanish-born author, in US from an undetermined point; John Smith, Emperor (1944) is a Near Future tale whose culture-Hero protagonist uses his Invention of a secret device to impose peace on the world, and to institute a Utopia where anything that the protagonist considers immoral (Sex is particularly offensive to him) is made ...
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 ...