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Friday 17 May 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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Corman, Roger
(1926-2024) US film-maker, a number of whose films are sf. Born in Los Angeles, he graduated in engineering from Stanford University in 1947, and spent a period in the US Navy and a term at Oxford University before going to Hollywood, where he began to write screenplays; his first sale was Highway Dragnet (1954), a picture he coproduced. He soon formed his own company and launched his spectacularly low-budget career. From 1956 he was regularly associated with ...
Wells, Hal K
(1899-1979) US author, in active service during World War One, who began to publish work of genre interest with "The Brass Key" in Weird Tales for February 1929. Much of his sf work – like Zehru of Xollar (February 1932 Astounding; 2008 ebook) – was Space Opera for Pulp journals, with a tendency to the lurid. Some of his ...
Dye, Charles
(1925-1960) US author who served in the US Air Force during World War Two and began publishing sf with "The Last Orbit" in Amazing for February 1950. He was active for less than half a decade, soon publishing his only sf novel, Prisoner in the Skull (1952), in which ordinary Homo sapiens and a form of Superman engage in thriller-like confrontations. After its US publication this ...
Carnegie Medal
This Award for distinguished works written for children was established in 1936 in memory of the Scots-born industrialist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919). Though not specifically a genre award, it has several times been presented for Fantasy and supernatural fiction whose themes border on or overlap Children's SF and Young Adult genre work, and in 2011 went ...
Prugovečki, Eduard
(1937-2003) Romanian-born physicist and author, in Canada from 1965; of sf interest are his two Utopias, Memoirs of the Future (2001), which rather abstractly describes a good and a bad world to come, affirming throughout the value of science when applied correctly; and Dawn of the New Man (2002), set in a vaguely-described distant Near Future where the good and the less good are described in terms of an ...
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. His first professional publication was a long sf-tinged poem, "Carcajou Lament" (Winter 1960 [ie Autumn 1959] Triquarterly); he only began consistently publishing sf reviews in his "New Fiction" column for the Toronto Star (1966-1967), and sf proper with ...