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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 ...
Hoshi Shinichi
(1926-1997) One of the pioneers of Japanese sf, who began publishing work of genre interest with "Sekisutora" ["Sextra"] for Uchūjin #2 in 1957. Hoshi, who specialized in the short-short story, became the first full-time sf writer in Japan. His stories were influential on the younger generation, and he was largely responsible for the popularization of sf and its way of thinking. He developed a writing style that gives an sf flavour even ...
O'Rourke, Frank
(1916-1989) US author whose most popular books were Westerns; he published over sixty works of fiction, and more than 100 stories during the 1940s and 1950s in Collier's and other slick magazines. One mystery novel appeared as by Frank O'Malley. His sole sf novel, Instant Gold (1964), is an amusing Satire in which a small and convivial cabal rocks the boat of American ...
Stoker, Shannon
(1985- ) US attorney and author whose Young Adult Dystopian sequence, the Registry series beginning with The Registry (2013), is set in a Near Future America where young women are treated in a manner evocative of the role of Women in SF predicted by Margaret Atwood in ...
Alexander, Alma
Pseudonym of Yugoslavian-born author Alma Alexander Hromic Deckert (1963- ), whose childhood was spent in Africa, her early adulthood in New Zealand, and who is currently in USA; active as an author of nonfantastic work from around 1995, and since that date mostly as an author of fantasy. Her first sequences, including the Changer of Days series, beginning with Changer of Days, Volume One (2001; vt The Hidden Queen 2005), and the ...
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 ...