SF Encyclopedia Home Page
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.
Site updated on 25 July 2024
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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 ...
Gay, J Drew
(1846-1890) UK journalist, politician, explorer and author in whose The Mystery of the Shroud: A Tale of Socialism (1887) a fog gives a socialist secret society the chance to conquer England in the Near Future, but the chance is muffed. [JC]
Pearce, Philippa
(1920-2006) UK author, almost exclusively of fantasy tales for children, though her first novel Minnow on the Say (1955; vt The Minnow Leads to Treasure 1958) as A Philippa Pearce is a nonfantastic treasure-hunt story of some charm. Her most famous novel, Tom's Midnight Garden (1958) as A Philippa Pearce, for which she won the Carnegie Medal, makes use of the time theories of J W Dunne to ...
Williams, Eric C
(1918-2010) UK author, previously a bookseller and involved with Fandom from the 1930s, publishing some fiction at that time in Fanzines, beginning with the simultaneous appearance of "Mr Hazel's Miracle Carpet" and "The Venus Vein" in Amateur Science Stories for December 1937. He began publishing sf professionally with "The Silent Ship" (July 1965 New Worlds) and ...
Grudova, Camilla
(? - ) Canadian author, in Scotland for some years, who began to publish work of genre interest with "Agata's Machine" in The White Review for June 2015. Much of her early work, whose abrupt surreal destabilizations of normative reality have evoked comparisons with the short stories of both Margaret Atwood and Angela Carter, was assembled as The Doll's Alphabet (coll ...
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 ...