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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 ...
Woolf, Alex
(1964- ) UK author, much of whose work has comprised popular nonfiction about a wide range of historical and contemporary issues; most of his fiction has appeared in series, invariably for children or Young Adult readers. Some are of direct sf interest. The Chronosphere sequence beginning with Time Out of Time (2012) revolves around the complications attending use of the eponymous central device, a ...
White, T H
(1906-1964) Indian-born author, in the UK from the age of five, where he was raised by relatives; his overwhelming nostalgia for a lost England expressed itself vividly throughout nonfiction like England Have my Bones (1936), as well as in his two best-known fictional works, the nonfantastic Farewell Victoria (1933), and The Once and Future King (omni/novel 1958), a superlative tragicomic fantasia on Le Morte Darthur (written before 1471; ...
Finn, Ralph L
(1912-1999) UK author and journalist who published widely, collecting some of his short fiction as Collected Stories of Ralph L Finn (coll 1946 chap); in his notes on "This Sorry Scheme" (magazine publication undated), George Locke suggests that the tale prefigures Jack Finney's far more complex Time and Again (1970). Of some sf interest are three novels based on the time theories of J W ...
De Bolt, Joe
(1939- ) US sociologist and university professor who in the 1970s edited useful critical anthologies on John Brunner and Ursula K Le Guin, contributing his own bio-bibliographical researches to both. These are The Happening Worlds of John Brunner: Critical Explorations in Science Fiction (anth 1975) and Ursula K. Le Guin: Voyager to Inner Lands and to Outer Space (anth ...
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 ...