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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 ...
Pariah Elite
Term introduced in The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, having been suggested by Roz Kaveney as shorthand for the common genre trope of a specially gifted but also distrusted, feared, and/or persecuted minority (as distinct from Secret Masters who influence the world but whose existence is generally unknown). The cadre that surrounds the Superman ...
Elliott, H Chandler
(1906-1978) Canadian-born physician, university teacher of medicine and author, in the US for many years; he began publishing work of genre interest with "Inanimate Objection" in Galaxy for February 1954. In his sf novel, Reprieve from Paradise (1955), Polynesians have survived an atomic World War Three, and forty centuries after their shocked discovery of the Post-Holocaust world, ...
Robinett, Stephen
(1941-2004) US author and lawyer who began publishing sf as Tak Hallus (apparently Persian for "pen name") with "Minitalent" in Analog for March 1969; most of his shorter work is assembled in Projections (coll 1979), where a sharp wit is allowed free and satirical play. Robinett's first novel, Mindwipe! (December 1969 Analog as by Tak Hallus; exp 1976) as by Steve Hahn, is unexceptional, but Stargate ...
Military SF
War and especially Future War are enduring sf themes. The melodramatic excesses of Space-Opera warfare faded with the pulps, although they were never to die out entirely. Complementing such extravagance, there grew up a more disciplined and more realistic notion of the kind of armies which might fight interplanetary and interstellar wars, and the kinds of Weapons they might use. ...
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 ...