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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 ...
Newell, C M
(1823-1909) US doctor, sailor and author, who began publishing non-fantastic sea-stories as by Captain Robert Barnacle, though Leaves from an Old Log: Pehe Nu-e, or The Tiger Whale of the Pacific (1877) is of some interest for its reworkings of Herman Melville's Moby-Dick (1851); several works under his own name were set in or around the Hawaii Archipelago, including ...
Howitt, William
(1792-1879) UK author, married to Mary Howitt (1799-1888) who was the first translator of Hans Christian Andersen (1805-1875) [see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below]. He wrote several tales classifiable as fantasies; Pantika: Or, Traditions of the Most Ancient Times (coll 1835 2vols) assembles several of these, including "Nichar, the Exile of Heaven", which describes a ...
Braine, Robert D
(1861-1943) US musician and author of Messages from Mars by the Aid of the Telescope Plant (1892), in which a shipwrecked sailor, finding the eponymous plant on the mysterious Pacific Island of Roxana, is seized by the natives, who transport him to a Lost World where they demonstrate to him the use of the plant to maintain Communications with Mars. The ...
Sem-Sandberg, Steve
(1958- ) Norwegian-born journalist, translator and author, in Sweden from childhood; his first two novels – Sländornas värld ["The World of Dragonflies"] (1976), an ironized Space Opera whose protagonist must persuade inhabitants of a colonized planet (see Colonization of Other Worlds) to return to the cold embrace of Terra, and the similar ...
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 ...