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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 ...
Todd, Ruthven
(1914-1978) Scottish scholar, poet and author, in US from 1947-1958, and then Majorca; his most important nonfiction work, Tracks in the Snow: Studies in English Science and Art (1946), effectively argued the imaginative power – when conjoined – of the two subtitled categories, instancing at length the work of William Blake (1748-1827) and John Martin; as R T Campbell, he wrote several detective novels, beginning with Unholy Dying ...
Williams, Heathcote
(1941-2017) UK poet, playwright, actor, political activist and author, initially notable in sf circles for his connections with the 1960s British New Wave, though he did not contribute material to its typical outlets; most of his work was, in fact, technically nonfantastic, though his plays – like his most famous, AC/DC (first performed Royal Court Theatre, London, 1970; in Gambit International Theatre Review, coll 1971) – were often ...
Woolf, Virginia
(1882-1941) UK critic and author, a central figure of the Bloomsbury Group of English writers, famous for novels sensitively structured around the flow of inner consciousness, the best known of these being perhaps To the Lighthouse (1927). Of sf interest is Orlando: A Biography (1928), filmed as Orlando (1992), whose androgynous hero/heroine (see Temporal Adventuress), a portrait of Vita ...
Villiers de L'Isle-Adam
Working name of French poet, playwright and author Jean-Marie-Mathias-Philippe-Auguste, Comte de Villiers de L'Isle-Adam (1838-1889); he was an extremely impoverished member of a minor branch of the Villiers de L'Isle-Adam family, long prominent in Brittany. Active as a poet from about 1859, even his first work, Premières poésies (coll 1859 chap), expressing the extremist Decadence that governed his contrarian stance as regards his ...
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 ...