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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 ...
Benni, Stefano
(1947- ) Italian journalist and author who published several nonfiction books before releasing his first novel, Terra! (1983; trans Annapaoloa Cancogni 1985), set in a Post-Holocaust world racked by Nuclear Winter; the action moves from the Underground city of Paris to a race through space to occupy a new and Edenic planet. Governing the farcical ...
Beverley, Barrington
Pseudonym used for two sf novels by Harry Leigh Pink (1906-1973), UK author who also wrote western and crime fiction under the working name Hal Pink; other pseudonyms were H Carson Marksman and Charles Van Horn. He was active in UK magazines (including The Passing Show) and US Pulps from 1925, and as a novelist from 1932 to 1941. The Beverley titles are The Air Devil (1934), which is as much ...
Morgan, Charles
(1894-1958) UK man of letters, playwright and author, in active service during World War One; some of his novels, like Sparkenboke (1936) and The Judge's Story (1947), verge solemnly upon the fantastic. Of sf interest is his last play, The Burning Glass (1953; performed 1954), set in the Near Future and describing a new Power-Source ...
Jacobson, Mark
(1948- ) US journalist – best known for his 1970s work for the Village Voice in New York – and author of an elaborately confabulated sf/fantasy novel, Gojiro (1991); the tale is seen through the eyes of a mild-mannered Monster, a Mutant lizard named after the Japanese film monster Gojira. Gojiro is a kind of Candide (see ...
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 ...