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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 ...
Douglass, Ellsworth
Pseudonym of US real-estate speculator, insurance broker and author Elmer Dwiggins (1863-1933), whose enterprises (for which he was jailed in 1919-1920) took him to various countries around the turn of the century; his fiction, including his one sf novel, was written during these travels. His first story, "The Wheels of Dr Ginochio Gyves" (September 1899 Cassell's Magazine) with Edwin Pallander, describes a gyroscopically controlled ...
Uesu Tetsuto
(? - ) Writing name of a Japanese author of Light Novels, whose most prominent works have bloated into serial fixups across other media, particularly Manga and Anime, with underlying themes arguably ill-suited to their low-brow venues. His first work, Kanojo wa Megane-HOLIC ["She's a Spectacle-HOLIC"] (2008-2009), exploits the elision in Japanese everyday ...
Williams, F Chenhalls
(1880-1965) UK minister, inventor (he patented an improved sash window catch) and author of several novels, two of which are sf. The Inner Number (1927) features a thought-reading Machine (see Psionics) which generates a romantic melodrama; in The Potter's Wheel (1931) as F C Williams, a Mad Scientist dies horribly after attempting to kill his daughter with his ...
Zeddies, Ann Tonsor
(1951- ) US author whose Deathgift sequence covers considerable ground in its two volumes. Deathgift (1989), though not technically a Pocket-Universe tale, embodies a fundamental rhythm of constriction and release through the story of a young boy abandoned to the Native-American-like tribes that mediate among the medieval cities which surround them, and who only later is subject to a ...
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 ...