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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 ...
Richards, Lysander Salmon
(1835-1926) US author of Breaking Up; Or, the Birth, Development, and Death of the Earth and its Satellite in Story (1896), a title evoking the cosmological perspectives of an author like the then popular Camille Flammarion, and the epic history being unpacked is intermittently "narratized", to give sentient interest, the viewpoint character being a dead but observant Alien from another star who tracks the ...
Jones, Ewart C
(? - ) UK author whose How Now Brown Cow? (1947) is a rural spoof with some fantasy elements, and in whose Head in the Sand (1958), set in a grey Near Future Britain, revolutionaries fail to dislodge the Soviets who have occupied the country. [JC]
Baker, Sharon
(1938-1991) US author of three Planetary Romances – all set on the planet Naphar – whose richly layered Fantasy surface conceals much sf underpinning: Naphar's poisonous environment has an sf explanation; the planet has been colonized by humans who interbred with the native race; and contacts with galactic civilization remain active. Quarreling, They Met the Dragon (1984) describes the coming to ...
Wainscot Societies
In The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, the term "wainscots" [see links below] denotes the common Fantasy trope of people or societies who live in the margins of a dominant civilization or the literal wainscots of its buildings. The classic fantasy example is The Borrowers (1952) by Mary Norton (1903-1992), televised as The Borrowers (1992 six episodes) and filmed as ...
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 ...