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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 ...
Virtual Reality
Since the mid-1980s, a popular item of sf Terminology, and for a century or so – in a rather more extended sense – a popular sf theme. In ordinary usage a virtual reality is a computer-generated scenario which seems real (or at least all-encompassing) to the person who "enters" it; one essential quality of virtual reality is that the person who enters it should be able to interact with it. To a degree all Videogames, as ...
Deeping, Warwick
(1877-1950) UK popular author, best known for the non-fantastic Sorrel and Son (1925); the first of his many books, Uther & Igraine (1903), was an Arthurian fantasy, as were The Man on the White Horse (1934) and The Sword and the Cross (1957). The Man Who Went Back (1940) is a Timeslip epic – J W Dunne's time theories are specifically referred to – ...
Counterfactual
Item of Terminology sometimes used to denote the Alternate History subgenre, thus avoiding the usual sf term. This avoidance may indicate either dislike of the conventional but grammatically awkward phrase "alternate history" or – regrettably often – an attempt to distance "respectable" or "literary" use of this traditional sf technique from science fiction itself. A narrative described as counterfactual will ...
Calder, Ritchie
(1906-1982) Scottish journalist, academic and author, active from 1922. He is of relevance to sf for his life-time advocacy of the science-driven creation of a peaceful future (see Futures Studies), from a left standpoint which, always moderate, never led him into any of the twentieth-century ideological bearpits into which the left (and the right) toppled so grimly and so often. His first book, The Birth of the Future (1934), is significant ...
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 ...