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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 ...
Albano, Peter
(1922-2006) US author who served in the US Navy 1942-1946; he is known mainly for the nine-book Seventh Carrier sequence of Military SF adventures starring the World War Two Japanese aircraft carrier Yonaga, trapped for over forty years in a secret port by a shift of glacier ice. The crew and airmen, now mostly in their sixties, finally break free in late 1983. Owing to a rogue Chinese anti-missile system whose ...
Hoffman, Eva
(1945- ) Polish academic and author, in Canada and the USA from the late 1950s (she is a citizen of both countries), but for many years in the UK. Hoffman is best known as a memoirist and as a historian of Jewish life and death during World War Two, her nonfiction titles including Exit Into History: A Journey Through the New Eastern Europe (1993), Stetl: The Life and Death of a Small Town and the World of Polish Jews ...
Erisman, Fred
(1937- ) US academic and author of nonfiction work on American popular fiction, concentrating on the Western and on children's literature, though he has written on sf topics in Extrapolation and elsewhere. He is of sf interest primarily for two studies. Boys' Books, Boys' Dreams, and the Mystique of Flight (2006) (see Airplane Boys; Airship Boys) ...
Barrett, William E
(1900-1986) US amateur pilot and author, many of whose stories were nonfantastic recounts of World War One combat; he had published Flight from Youth (1939) before the war, later incorporating it into The Edge of Things (coll 1960), whose three stories all relate in some way to flying. Much earlier, he began publishing short stories with "The Music of Madness" for Weird Tales, March 1926. His sf novel, The Fools of Time ...
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 ...