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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 ...
Eno, Brian
(1948- ) Influential UK musician, associated with the invention of minimalist "ambient" musical styles. Much of his work is instrumental, and identifying it as sf is an unsure business, although there is a spacious and material "otherworldliness" about the best of Eno's ambient compositions that are certainly evocative in the same way that some sf is evocative. Another Green World (1975) perhaps filters perceptions of the Earth through an imaginary other ...
Rabelais, François
(?1483/1494-1553) French monk, doctor, priest and author. The various titles now generally gathered together as Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532-1552 plus a posthumous text of dubious authenticity 1564) were initially published as separate volumes [see Checklist for individual titles plus the translations of same by Sir Thomas Urquhart – first two books 1653, third book 1693 – and Peter Anthony Motteux – fourth and fifth books 1694]. ...
Currey, L W
(1942- ) US specialist bookseller (since 1968) and bibliographer. With David G Hartwell he published SF-I: A Selective Bibliography (1971 chap), writing together as Kilgore Trout; with Hartwell founded (in 1973) and operated Dragon Press, a Small Press publishing books about sf, fantasy and horror; the partnership was dissolved in ...
Higginbottom, W Hugh
(1881-1937) UK artist and author of King of Kulturia (1915), a Near Future Satire on the deficiencies of German culture as they were revealed during World War One; in this period, satirical English takes on Germany commonly spelled culture with a k. The tale, set in 1920, is digressive. [JC]
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 ...