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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 ...
Logan, Charles
(1930- ) UK author, and nurse for the mentally handicapped. Shipwreck (1975) won the 1975 Gollancz/Sunday Times sf contest jointly with Chris Boyce's Catchworld (1975). Calmly and inexorably, it tells the story of the inevitable death of a man whose Spaceship lands disabled on a planet orbiting Capella; the Ecology he is faced with is inimical to ...
Tomita
Working name of Isao Tomita (1932-2016), Japanese electronic musician. A pioneer in the popularization of synthesizer composition, Tomita cut his teeth recording electronic versions of famous works from the classical canon – some of these still sound very fresh, not least, his inventively varied rendering of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition (1975) and his brisk version of Stravinsky's Firebird Suite (1975). But, perhaps because the electronic synthesizer ...
Wright, William Henry
(1856-1934) US journalist and author, perhaps best known for his nonfiction The Black Bear (1910) about raising a bear named Ben from infancy. Of sf interest is The Great Bread Trust (1900 chap), a Satire on capitalist excesses in which an entrepreneur, after heading a cartel that corners the market in cereal, has himself proclaimed the King of America. [JC]
Lively, Adam
(1961- ) UK author, son of Penelope Lively (1931- ) [see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below], in whose first novel, Blue Fruit (1988), an eighteenth-century traveller in the Far East takes ship back to an Alternate World version of twentieth-century America, though the new world makes little impression on him (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 ...