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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 ...
Nesbit, E
(1858-1924) UK playwright, poet and author, who also wrote as Fabian Bland and E Bland (the latter being her husband's name, an unknown proportion of whose signed work was by her); she was a founder of the Fabian Society in 1884. Most of her oeuvre, over a wide-ranging career that extended from the 1880s until after World War One, can be considered under three headings: the nonfantastic adult fiction (not discussed or listed here); the supernatural and weird fiction, some of which contains ...
Karloff, Boris
Pseudonym of UK-born actor William Henry Pratt (1887-1969), in Canada and then the US from the teens of the twentieth century; he featured in many silent films from about 1916, including Tarzan and the Golden Lion (1927) (see Tarzan Films), based on the Edgar Rice Burroughs novel; but became famous for his title role in the early sound film Frankenstein (1931) ...
Conquest of Space
Film (1955). Paramount. Produced by George Pal, directed by Byron Haskin. Written by James O'Hanlon and others including Barré Lyndon (see Alfred Edgar); based remotely on Das Marsprojekt (1952 Weltraumfahrt; 1952; trans Henry J White as The Mars Project 1953) by Wernher von Braun. Cast includes Walter Brooke, ...
Wallace, King
(? -? ) US author whose sf novel, The Next War: A Prediction (1892), not untypically for its time and place of origin, plays on white racial fears of Black uprisings in the Near Future (see Race in SF). In this case, after failing to Poison all American whites, the Blacks lose the ensuing rebellion and disperse into the hinterlands, where they become ...
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 ...