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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 ...
Einstein, Charles
(1926-2007) US author and journalist who is chiefly recognized for nonfiction works about Baseball; his best-known fiction was perhaps his first novel, The Bloody Spur (1953), which Fritz Lang made into the film Why the City Sleeps (1956). He began publishing work of genre interest with "Tunnel 1971", in Saturn in May 1957; his Near-Future ...
Rickett, Joseph Compton
(1847-1919) UK industrialist, lay preacher, politician (Liberal MP from 1895 until his death, holding Cabinet office from 1916) and author, born Joseph Rickett, who also wrote as by Maurice Baxter; he was knighted in 1907 and changed his name to Compton-Rickett in 1908. His sf novel The Quickening of Caliban: A Modern Story of Evolution (1893) suggests that a Lost Race of Homo sapiens – more natural (i.e., perhaps, less evolved) than ...
Campion, Sarah
Pseudonym of UK-born teacher, journalist and author Mary Rose Coulton (1906-2002), author of Father: A Portrait of G G Coulton (1948), an impressive biography of her father George Gordon Coulton (1858-1947), the important medieval scholar who also wrote Friar's Lantern (1906), a Timeslip fantasy. Her fourth novel, Thirty Million Gas Masks (1936), is a Near Future tale predictive of the coming ...
Linbach, Gustave
Apparent pseudonym of the unidentified UK author (? -? ) of The Azrael of Anarchy (1894), set in a Near Future England subverted by an anarchist conspiracy against the realm led by Sir Dunstan Gryme, whose experiments with and Inventions of new Poisons (which he uses ruthlessly) make him seem at first little more than 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 ...