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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 ...
Helders, Major von
Pseudonym of German soldier and author Robert Knauss (1892-1955), who served in both World War One and World War Two, rising to the rank of Lieutenant-General, and whose nonfiction works focused on aviation matters. Of sf interest is Luftkrieg 1936: Die Zertrümmerun von Paris (1932; trans Claud W Sykes as The War in the Air, 1936 1932; German original rev vt Luftkrieg 1938: Die Zertrümmerun von Paris 1934), a ...
Czech and Slovak SF
In Czechoslovakia there are two main groups, the Czechs and the Slovaks, speaking different languages. Sf is written in both. / The history of Czech sf begins in the nineteenth century, with the first true sf work probably being Zivot na Měsíci ["Life on the Moon"] (1881) by Karel Pleskač. Also of interest are some of the works of the famous mainstream author Svatopluk Čech; for example, Hanuman (1884; trans W W Strickland 1894), ...
Education in SF
Arguably, many sf works project the aura of a classroom, as writers undertake to explain their fantastic worlds' new Technology and other features at length by means of instructional Infodumps. A common pattern in Utopian novels is to pair naïve newcomers with longtime residents assigned to show and describe how their society functions, as seen in Edward Bellamy's ...
Olan, Susan Torian
(1947-1999) US author whose The Earth Remembers (1990) is a cagily written example of the everything-but-the-kitchen-sink variety of Post-Holocaust fiction. Taking the form of a Western set along the Texas-Mexico border, the tale features Mutants, Amerindians and nuclear devices along with the usual protagonists and antagonists. [JC]
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 ...