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
Sponsor of the day: The League of Fan Funds
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 ...
Robinsonade
Daniel Defoe's The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719) provides the name and is the central model for the robinsonade, which may be defined as the romance of solitary survival in such inimical (though ultimately compliant) terrains as desert Islands (or planets), seen as a success-story. Earlier tales do exist (in The Imaginary Voyage in Prose Fiction [1941], Philip Babcock ...
Russell, W Clark
(1844-1911) US-born sailor (1858-1866), journalist and author, UK-based from early childhood, most of whose prolific output (something like fifty-seven novels) dealt with sailors and the sea. Of sf interest are The Frozen Pirate (1887 2vols), in which a French pirate, frozen for years in cold climes, is resuscitated briefly from this Suspended Animation and tells the narrator where there is some buried treasure; and ...
Dudbroke
Or Montague Dudbroke, narrator of the one novel attributed to this name. Pseudonym of an unidentified UK author (? -? ) – E F Bleiler in Science Fiction: The Early Years (dated 1990 but 1991) suggests that the author may have been a biologist – whose The Prots: A Weird Romance (1903) uncannily prefigures Karel Čapek's The War with the Newts ...
Lynch, Bohun
(1884-1928) UK author and caricaturist in whose one novel of sf interest is Menace from the Moon (1925), a Scientific Romance which rather casually blends Alien Invasion and Lost-World tropes, as descendants of a Moon colony, established by the seventeenth-century European Inventors of ...
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 ...