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 ...
Ellis, Dean
(1920-2009) US illustrator whose main interests lay outside the sf genre – he did much Illustration for advertising, for general magazines, and notably for postage stamps in the US and some other countries. He received his formal art training at the Cleveland Institute of Art – his studies interrupted by four years' active service in the Pacific – graduating in fine art, followed by postgraduate work at the Boston Museum School of Fine Art. He ...
Viger, A
Pseudonym of French geophysicist and author Alphonse Berget (1850-1933), almost certainly the instigator of and senior collaborator in the sf novel L'Anneau de Lumière: grand roman scientifique d'aventures (6 November 1921-4 February 1922 Le Petit Parisien; 1922; trans Brian Stableford as The Ring of Light 2018) with Léon Miral, both signing variously as Miral-Viger, or L ...
Allen, Arthur Bruce
(1903-1975) UK author whose The Pyromaniac (1938) uninterestingly features the use of a heat-operated Ray Gun. [JC]
Robbins, David
(1950- ) US author, prolific in several genres under various names, his first novel, The Wereling (1983), being horror; perhaps best known for the nonfantastic Wilderness sequence of Westerns as by David Thompson. He is of greatest sf interest for the Endworld Post-Holocaust Survivalist sequence, which begins with ...
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 ...