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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 ...
Barr, Martin W
(1860-1938) US medical doctor and author; in the former capacity, as superintendent from 1893 to an unknown date of the Pennsylvania Training School for Feeble-Minded Children at Elwyn, he was a strong advocate of the sterilization of "mental defectives" in his care whom he deemed incurable. Of sf interest is his only novel, The King of Thomond: A Story of Yesterday (1907), in the frame story of which the superintendent of a Pennsylvania insane asylum presents the first-person ...
Death Line
Film (1972; vt Raw Meat US). K-L Productions. Directed by Gary Sherman. Written by Ceri Jones, from a story by Sherman. Cast includes Hugh Armstrong, Sharon Gurney, David Ladd, Donald Pleasence and Norman Rossington. 87 minutes. Colour. / In the late nineteenth century a group of construction workers building an extension to London's Underground railway system are buried in a cave-in. In the present, late-night travellers at Russell Square tube ...
Stackpole, Michael A
(1957- ) US designer of Role Playing Games from around 1978 and author, much of whose work has been related directly or indirectly to his design work, much of it being fantasy. His two main series, however, are Ties to sf universes: the Battletech sequences beginning with Battletech: The Warrior Trilogy, Volume One: En Garde (1988) (for the Wargame, see ...
Dalton, Moray
Pseudonym of UK author Katharine Renoir (1881-1963). Of her 30 or so adventure thrillers, one is clearly sf: in The Black Death (1934), after a devastating Disaster, a group of men and women awake into a Ruined Earth dominated by a world state. She is not to be confused with Arthur Laxton Haynes (1883-? ), who wrote a book of verse [title not known] in 1915 as Moray Dalton. [SH/JC]
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 ...