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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 ...
Cobban, J MacLaren
(1849-1903) UK author, of some interest for Master of His Fate (October-December 1889 Blackwood's Magazine; 1890), whose protagonist, tortured by the need vampirically to drain the life energy of others to maintain his own Immortality, confesses all to an expert in the field of animal magnetism; and then – convulsively aged into an old man, as always happens before he feeds – kills himself. The Tyrants of Kool-Sim ...
Kane, Bob
Working name of US Comic-book writer, artist and animator Robert Kahn (1915-1998), who is best known for co-creating Batman with writer Bill Finger. Kane's career began as a trainee animator at the Max Fleischer Studio; he joined the Eisner-Eiger comic-book workshop in 1937, drawing gag cartoons and a comedy adventure strip called Peter Pupp. His first work published by National (which later became ...
Calisher, Hortense
(1911-2009) US author of several Mainstream novels set mostly on the US East Coast and in New York itself, which she rendered with Gothic intensity. After an sf allegory, "In the Absence of Angels" (21 April 1951 The New Yorker), which associates the military occupation of the USA with a poet's own imprisonment, and the very well-known horror story "Heartburn" (January 1951 The American Mercury), came her sf ...
Jarry, Alfred
(1873-1907) French author who carried the fruits of his scientific education into his surreal avant-garde writing, particularly the influence of the French evolutionary philosopher Henri Bergson (1859-1941). Jarry's famous play Ubu roi [for subtitle see Checklist] (performed 1896; 1896; trans 1951) and its several sequels including "Ubu enchaîné" (1900 Revue Blanche; trans B Keith and G Legman as King Turd 1953) – helped found the ...
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 ...