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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 ...
Hussingtree, Martin
Pseudonym of UK politician and author Oliver Ridsdale Baldwin (1899-1958), son of the British politician and prime minister Stanley Baldwin (1867-1947); his pseudonym is taken from Martin Hussingtree, a small village in Worcestershire not far from the Baldwin family ironworks factory in Wilden. Baldwin's experiences during active service in World War One were devastating, avowedly created a socialist out of him, and almost certainly shaped his sf novel, ...
Temianka, Dan
(? - ) US author and critic who began to publish work of genre interest with reviews of Jack Vance in Fantasy Review for June 1986 as Daniel Temianka. His major critical publication is The Jack Vance Lexicon: From Ahulph to Zipangote: The Coined Words of Jack Vance (1992; vt The Jack Vance Lexicon: The Coined Words of Jack Vance, from Ahulph to Zipangote 1995; ...
France
The history of France's relationship with sf is one of long flirtation, marked through the centuries by episodic outbursts of passion and, in recent times, by an increasing shift from authorship to readership, from the active to the passive role, as more and more people become avid consumers of the US/UK sf tradition. A few remarkable French writers of sf have emerged, but, although the 1970s were an active period for French sf, no truly indigenous school of writing has yet taken shape. / A ...
d'Arch Smith, Timothy
(1936- ) UK bibliographer, antiquarian bookseller, and author, whose wit and scholarly predilections – Montague Summers (see Bibliographies), Aleister Crowley, rock 'n' roll, and cricket (see Games and Sports) – inform his contribution to the genre. Alembic (1992) is a work of Hard SF that joins alchemy, rock 'n' roll (see ...
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 ...