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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 ...
Frey, James N
(1943- ) US creative writing teacher (he has published manuals in that field) and author, not to be confused with Mark Washburn, one of whose novels, The Armageddon Game: A Novel of Suspense (1977), shares its main title with Frey's The Armageddon Game (1985) as J N Frey; only Washburn's tale verges on the fantastic. The Elixir (1986) is a Gothic-SF/fantasy story of ...
Turner, Edgar
(1857-1942) UK author whose The Girl with Feet of Clay (coll 1900) contains some spoofs and tales of genre interest, including "The Little Girl", in which a character resembling Marie Corelli literally refuses to grow up; there is no evidence that J M Barrie was familiar with the tale. Turner's Lost-World adventure, The Armada Gold (1908) with Reginald Hodder, which is set on two ...
Minahan, John
(1933-2002) US author of the John Rawlings sequence of thrillers, the seventh of which, The Great Grave Robbery (1990), turns on the search for a thief who has risen from Suspended Animation (see also Cryonics). [JC]
Optimism and Pessimism
In the most simplistic version of the History of SF, sf was always (and rightly) an optimistic literature until the New Wave came along in the 1960s and spoiled everything. This was at best a very partial truth, being only remotely applicable to Genre SF and not at all to Mainstream sf. / In the mainstream, not even the work of individual authors could be ...
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 ...