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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 ...
Cicero
(106-43 BCE) Marcus Tullius Cicero, celebrated Roman orator and author of many works. He is included here for his interplanetary fable Somnium Scipionis ["The Dream of Scipio"] which is part of his De re publica ["On the Republic"] (51 BCE). In this terse but suggestive text the historical figure Publius Cornelius Scipio Aemilianus is taken by the spirit of his adoptive grandfather, the famous Scipio Africanus, up through the planetary spheres of a Ptolemaic solar system. ...
Chesney, George T
(1830-1895) UK soldier, founder in 1871 of the Royal Indian Civil Engineering College at Staines, a Conservative Member of Parliament from 1892 for Oxford, and author of some fiction, including the famous The Battle of Dorking: Reminiscences of a Volunteer (May 1871 Blackwood's Magazine; 1871 chap; vt The Fall of England? The Battle of Dorking: Reminiscences of a Volunteer 1871 chap) [see Checklist for further details on vts] published anonymously, though the ...
Rife, Robert
(? - ) US author of The Cool Thing: A Dark Comedy. Or Not (2021), a moderately spoofish sf thriller whose protagonist – purchasing in error a relic from a crashed Alien Spaceship which turns out to be a kind of matter transmitter (see Matter Transmission) – is briefly entrapped in a Mad Scientist's ...
Olsen, Per G
(1944-2016) Norwegian author born Olsen who later changed his name to Hvidsten but continued to publish as Olsen. During the sixties and the following decades he was involved in almost every imaginable activity, both professionally and fan-related. He started as editor of the Fanzine Alhabor and a member of several APAs, and later turned to film-related fanzines such as Filmfan and Filmforum ...
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 ...