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
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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 ...
Margrie, William
(1877-1960) UK philosopher and author whose Near Future tale, The Story of a Great Experiment: How England Produced the First Superman (1927), dramatizes his conviction that strictly applied Eugenics was required for the Evolution of the human race; unfortunately for women, their central role is to breed better men. ...
Susann, Jacqueline
(1918-1974) US author most famous for her first novel, Valley of the Dolls (1966); her only sf is the posthumous Yargo (1979), which, written in the 1950s, tells the tale of a young woman abducted by a UFO actually trying to kidnap Albert Einstein; she falls in love with Yargo, the ruler of the planet Yargo (see Exogamy), but is sent off on Planetary Romance adventures ...
Robertson, Al
(? - ) UK musician and author who began to publish work of genre interest with "Golden" in The Third Alternative for Spring 2004; his first novel Crashing Heaven (2015), which begins the Station series, is a Space Opera with Cyberpunk intonations, set in a period after Earth has been abandoned due to the behaviour of ...
Wells, Simon
(1961- ) UK animator and director, great-grandson of H G Wells and protegé of Steven Spielberg. He branched out into live action with The Time Machine (2002), and into Robert Zemeckis's performance-capture technology with Mars Needs Moms (2011), which he also co-wrote ...
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 ...