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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 ...
Furney, Elliott E
(1848-1914) US medical doctor (based in St Louis, Missouri), inventor and author, whose Culture, a Modern Method (1891) applies techniques that might a century later be described as Genetic Engineering with Lamarckian implications, with the Invention of a process by which unhealthy cellular material is recast and rejuvenated; further experiments, where animals are – perhaps surgically – modified into ...
Szabó-Zalán, Nicholas
(?1886-? ) Hungarian author, in active service during World War One, seemingly in Argentina from some point around 1945, after Hungary began to slip into the grasp of the USSR. Mission to Earth (1955) – whose apparent subtitle, The Book of Many Colours, appears only on the dust jacket – presents a kind of sacred drama in terms of a roughshod Equipoise. The ...
Herscholt, Wolfe
An Australian pseudonym or more likely a House Name used mainly by G C Bleeck and Russell Hausfeld on some unremarkable Scientific Thrillers titles, two of them of novella length. These are Magnetic Peril (1949 chap) and X-Ray Menace (1949 chap), both involving Inventions; in the first a new metal is used to magnetically attract ocean liners (see ...
L'Engle, Madeleine
Working name of US actress, author and playwright Madeleine L'Engle Camp (1918-2007), whose first play, 18 Washington Square, South (1944), was produced in 1940, and who performed on the stage during the early 1940s. Her first novel, The Small Rain (1945), and some of its successors are non-genre fictions for adult audiences, but from And Both Were Young (1949) most of her sixty or more books were for children; her later work was significant in the ...
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 ...