SF Encyclopedia Home Page
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.
Site updated on 25 July 2024
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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 ...
Nektar
UK progressive rock band, founded in Hamburg in 1969 and based thereafter in Germany. Their first album, Journey to the Centre of the Eye (1971) spins an only obliquely Verne-like premise in which an astronaut travels to another dimension from which he is able to witness the nuclear destruction of Earth. A Tab in the Ocean (1972) is an incoherently druggy suite of songs, this time premised on the idea of dropping an enormous "tab" of ...
Electric Spec
US low-paying Online Magazine published by Lesley Smith of Boulder, Colorado, initially with the editorial assistance of David Hughes, Renata Hill and Georgia Simonds but now edited by Betsy Dornbusch and David Hughes. Originally published three times a year, the magazine began in Spring 2006 and went quarterly from Spring 2010. The first four volumes, until Winter 2009, were downloadable in pdf format, but issues are now only accessible at the website. ...
Dolan, Mike
(? - ) US author of an unremarkable collection of sf stories, Santana Morning and Other Stories (coll 1970; exp vt Another Santana Morning 2008), none of them previously published. Most are set in Near Future desert terrains. [JC]
Europe
Swedish rock band, formed in Stockholm in 1979, whose surprisingly enjoyable and sometimes inadvertently comical stadium rock, whilst mostly articulating predictable heavy-metal sentiments, occasionally addresses sf topics. Their first release Europe (1983), for instance, included the egregiously-titled "In the Future to Come" which warns rather incoherently of impending doom ("But one day or another / This world would maybe / Be destroyed forever / 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 ...