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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 ...
Konstantinou, Lee
(1978- ) US author whose an sf novel, Pop Apocalypse (2009) is set in a Near Future world on the brink of the eponymous collapse of civilization. In occupied Northern California, an Doppelganger begins to haunt the protagonist – an Elvis Presley impersonator – who is forced complicatedly to discover a conspiracy involving ...
Altruism
Everyone is familiar with C P Snow's 1959 lecture on "The Two Cultures", incorporated into Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (1959), wherein he expressed alarm over the perceived separation of the communities of the sciences and the humanities; but few have noted his stated reason for the called-for reconciliation of the two divided communities: the need to address the growing divide between the rich nations and the poor nations of the ...
Yellow Magazine, The
UK fortnightly general fiction magazine published by Amalgamated Press, London; 130 issues, 23 September 1921 to 17 September 1926, appeared alternate Fridays with The Red Magazine, both edited by John Stock. The magazine was very similar to The Red, though if anything was more light-hearted. For the five years it existed it seemed to siphon away from The Red much of its mystery fiction and science fiction. Many of the same contributors ...
Smith, Gavin [1]
(? - ) Author, apparently US-based, of the novel DogFellow's Ghost (2008), which depicts the lives of surgically engineered creatures (see Uplift) on a Pacific Island after their "Master" has abandoned them. The tale reads almost as a grim Sequel by Other Hands to H G Wells's The Island of Dr Moreau (1896). ...
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 ...