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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 ...
Puzo, Mario
(1920-1999) US author, best known for The Godfather (1969); he is of sf interest for The Fourth K (1990), a Near Future political thriller in which President Francis Xavier Kennedy takes the opportunity of the partial destruction of Manhattan (see New York) by Islamic terrorists to introduce authoritarian measures, ostensibly in order to save America. Puzo also co-wrote the screenplays for ...
Shaw, Bob
Working name of Northern Irish author Robert Shaw (1931-1996), in Canada 1956-1958 and the mainland UK from 1973. He worked in structural engineering until the age of twenty-seven, then aircraft design, then industrial public relations and journalism, becoming a full-time author in 1975. Shaw was early involved in sf Fandom, with stories and articles published in the Fanzine Slant from 1951 and his first book ...
Nedram
Pseudonym of the unidentified UK author (? -? ), whose surname might plausibly be Marden, of John Sagur (1921), a Utopia in which the eponymous inventor of a new Power Source becomes dictator of the world and brings peace. [JC]
Sand, George
Pseudonym of French author Amantine Lucille Aurore Dupin (1804-1876), a figure of cultural importance in France from the 1830s until her death; she published widely, an oeuvre which included about forty novels alone. Of sf interest is Laura: Voyage dans le cristal (1864; trans Pauline Pearson-Stamps as Journey Within the Crystal 1992; new trans Sue Dyson as Laura: Journey into the Crystal 2004). This is both an anticipation of ...
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 ...