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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 ...
Westerfeld, Scott
(1963- ) US composer and author – married since 2001 to Justine Larbalestier – whose first sf novel, Polymorph (1997), a tale immersed in a heatedly entangled New York, features a Shapeshifter protagonist who seems to match the city, both protagonist and venue being rendered in ways that hint of his Urban Fantasies [see The ...
Maddoux, Marlin
(1933-2004) US radio talk host, founder of International Christian Media and the National Center for Freedom and Renewal, and author whose The Seal of Gaia: A Novel of the Antichrist (1998) conceives in Christian terms of apocalyptic events in a 2033 world run by a single government in the name of Gaia, but whose secret agenda (see Paranoia) is evil. [JC]
Saville, Malcolm
(1901-1982) UK editor and author, mostly for younger readers from 1943 until his death, most of his work being grouped into various series, the best known of these being the Lone Pine sequence, centring on a group of young friends who, in the first instalment, Mystery at Witchend (1943), thwart some German spies. Nothing of his work is of sf interest except for one tale in that series, Saucers Over the Moor: A Lone Pine Story (1955), in which the gang ...
Cole, Charles
(? -? ) US author of Visitors from Mars: A Narrative (1901), whose protagonist, frustrated after the failure of his Invention, a heavier-than-air plane, to win earthly success, is approached by a small man from Mars, who persuades him to visit. On arrival, the protagonist is made welcome to the Martian Utopia, whose inhabitants are vegetarian, atheist, extremely ...
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 ...