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
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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 ...
Hoffmann, E T A
(1776-1822) German composer, painter, lawyer, judge and author. For many years he had thought of himself primarily as a musician, being intensely involved in all aspects of Music, including many critical works and compositions – several of his operas, including Undine (first performed 1816) were produced successfully; in 1810, for the publication of one of these compositions – the Miserere in B Flat Minor ...
Brown, George Mackay
(1921-1996) Scottish poet, playwright, journalist and author, active from the mid-1940s with The Orkney Herald and other local papers, where his casual-seeming but intensely felt essays on the history and fate of the Orkneys appeared until his death. With his first volumes of poems, The Storm, and Other Poems (coll 1954 chap) and Loaves and Fishes (coll 1959 chap) he began to establish himself as a poet of very considerable stature; he remains best known for ...
Shuttle, Penelope
(1947- ) UK poet and author, married to Peter Redgrove (whom see for their sf collaborations) until his death in 2003. Jesusa (1971 chap) is an expressionist presentation of Sex seen as metamorphic, mythopoeic. Her only full-length solo fiction of genre interest, The Mirror of the Giant: A Ghost Story (1980), combines Feminist self-analysis with elements of ...
Supernatural Creatures
This entry provides an overview of the treatment of supernatural beings in sf, some of the more important, interesting or simply popular subsets of such entities also being given separate entries: Gods and Demons, Golem, Poltergeists, Shapeshifters, Vampires, Werewolves and ...
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 ...