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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 ...
Gallant, Craig
(? - ) US teacher and author, most of whose fiction is contained in the Wild West Exodus over-series of Alternate-World Steampunk Westerns beginning with the first volume of the Shared World Jesse James Archives subseries, Honor Among Outlaws (2013), based on a Wargame, ...
Pandemic
A plague is a disease that travels from somewhere else. Many afflictions which are difficult to transmit, like leprosy, or the legion of cancers, are not normally described here, therefore, even loosely, as plagues, and are not treated in this encyclopedia under the Pandemic heading, a term here applied to contagions that invade. Various pestilences – including bubonic or pneumonic plague – do of course meet that loose criterion. Their pedigree is deep; invasive plagues have ...
Ryder, James
Pseudonym of UK author James Pattinson (1915-2009), a merchant-navy gunner during World War Two; his more than 100 novels are mostly thrillers under his own name, many with naval settings. His sf adventures for Robert Hale Limited are Kark (1969), set in a Near Future authoritarian Dystopian state of Britain against which the protagonist rebels, and Vicious Spiral ...
Kenyon, Ernest M
(1920-1980) US author who began to publish sf with "Security" for Astounding in October 1955, but did not actively pursue a career in the genre. Rogue Golem (1977) is an sf adventure about an Android who, in a highly regimented Near Future, by suspecting his nature violates his programming. [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 ...