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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 ...
Chevalier, Haakon
(1901-1985) US author and translator from the French of many works; his career as a US university professor was destroyed by the House Unamerican Affairs Committee after 1950, and he emigrated to France where he worked as a translator. His novel The Man Who Would Be God (1959) was meant as a self-defence against the 1953 accusation that he had committed treason with Robert Oppenheimer (1904-1967), the "father of the atomic bomb". Almost inadvertently, the tale creates a portrait ...
Jeury, Michel
(1934-2015) French author whose apprentice sf in the 1960s was written as by Albert Higon (a pseudonym he used occasionally in later decades as well); his first novel under his own name, Le temps incertain (1973; trans Maxim Jakubowski as Chronolysis 1980), very clearly evokes the world and methods of Philip K Dick in a Changewar plot that pits agents from a fascist ...
Fiske, Amos K
(1842-1921) US lawyer, journalist and author of Beyond the Bourn: Reports of a Traveller Returned from the "Undiscovered Country", Submitted to the World by Amos K Fiske (1891) which, from within a fantasy frame evoking the Afterlife (see the Encyclopedia of Fantasy), describes in detail a Utopia on another planet, where sexual abstinence has helped create a benevolent Christian world [JC]
Harpman, Jacqueline
(1929-2012) Belgian psychoanalyst and author, moderately prolific since the 1950. Of sf interest are Moi Qui N'ai Pas Connu Les Hommes (1995; trans Ros Schwartz as I Who Have Never Known Men 1997), depicts a Post-Holocaust Dystopia where women are kept in Underground cages; and Orlanda (1996; trans Ros Schwartz 1999), which plays with some ...
Robinson, Roger
(1943- ) UK computer programmer, bibliographer and publisher, active in UK Fandom for many years. The Writings of Henry Kenneth Bulmer (1983 chap; rev 1984 chap) is an exhaustive Bibliography of one of the most prolific sf writers, Kenneth Bulmer, and Who's Hugh?: An SF Reader's Guide to Pseudonyms (1987) is similarly exhaustive in its ...