SF Encyclopedia Home Page
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
Sponsor of the day: Handheld Press
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 ...
Borders, Joe H
(1858-1930) US newspaper owner from Eastern Kentucky and author of The Queen of Appalachia (1901), a Lost Race novel set unusually in the eastern USA, where a civilization made up of descendants of early American pioneers has established an arcadian, monarchical Utopia supported by advanced Technology. [JC]
Summerville, Jenny
(? - ) Australian author, the young protagonists of whose Young Adult sf novel, Shields of Trell (1984), play with the controls of their spacebus, and find it is a Starship capable of intergalactic travel. Various perils including a Black Hole are duly encountered. [JC]
New Weird
Term apparently coined by M John Harrison in his introduction to China Miéville's The Tain (2002 chap), titled "China Miéville and the New Weird". It was taken up by Miéville himself in a guest editorial for The Third Alternative (Summer 2003), describing that magazine's general ambience but later understood as a supposed subgenre whose ...
Richardson, Benjamin Ward
(1828-1896) UK physician and author, eminent in the former capacity, for which he was knighted in 1893. He published and edited many medical studies, and pioneered the development of safe anaesthetics; an offshoot of these activities was the nonfictional Hygeia: A City of Health (1876), which describes a Utopia whose hygiene is spotless. As an author of fiction, he is some sf interest for The Son of a Star: A Romance of the Second Century ...
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 ...