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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 ...
Dye, Charles
(1925-1960) US author who served in the US Air Force during World War Two and began publishing sf with "The Last Orbit" in Amazing for February 1950. He was active for less than half a decade, soon publishing his only sf novel, Prisoner in the Skull (1952), in which ordinary Homo sapiens and a form of Superman engage in thriller-like confrontations. After its US publication this ...
Matinee
Film (1993). Universal. Directed by Joe Dante, screenplay Charlie Haas from a story by Jerico and Charlie Haas. Cast includes Simon Fenton, John Goodman, Lisa Jakub, Omri Katz and Cathy Moriarty. 99 minutes. Colour. / Not so much an sf movie as a movie giving a cultural critique of sf movies. The setting is Key West, Florida, during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, when nuclear war for a time seemed imminent. Teenager Gene Loomis (Fenton) is new in town, ...
Smythe, James
(1980- ) UK author who writes Young Adult fiction as J P Smythe; his first novel, Hereditation (2010) is an essentially nonfantastic Gothic set in New York. Of sf interest is The Testimony (2012), in which a Dystopian Near Future world is confronted with a seemingly irrefutable annunciation – perhaps in the very ...
Yerxa, Leroy
(1915-1946) US author for the Pulp magazines, particularly the Ziff-Davis productions Amazing and Fantastic Adventures. He published under his own name and under some pseudonyms, the main one being Elroy Arno; others included Lee Francis which evolved into a House Name after his death (see also Frances Yerxa below as possible author under ...
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 ...