SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Wednesday 6 December 2023
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 4 December 2023
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Compton, D G
(1930-2023) UK author, born of parents who were both in the theatre; he increasingly lived in the USA after 1981. As Guy Compton, he published some unremarkable detective novels, beginning with Too Many Murderers (1962), and as by Frances Lynch produced some nonfantastic Gothics throughout his career; but soon turned to sf with tales almost always set in the Near Future, and anatomizing moral dilemmas within that arena: the future is very clearly ...
Kling, Marc-Uwe
(1982- ) German singer-songwriter, cabaret performer and author, active from around 2003; he is of interest for his first novel, QualityLand (2017; trans Jamie Lee Searle 2020), a vaudeville-like Satire of the Near Future Media Landscape, focused upon a Dystopian region called QualityLand where ...
Liljencrancz, Ottilie A
(1876-1910) US author whose first novel, The Thrall of Leif the Lucky: A Story of Viking Days (1902), is a Lost Race tale set in the Arctic; two of her subsequent tales, The Vinland Champions (1904) and Randvar the Songsmith: A Romance of Norumbega (1906), similarly introduce Prehistoric SF and Nordic Saga elements into their romanticized take on the North-Eastern coast of pre-Columbian ...
Kuppord, Skelton
Pseudonym of UK academic, educationist and author John Adams (1857-1934), prolific author of nonfiction under his own name. As Kuppord, he wrote several tales, usually for boys; The Uncharted Island (dated 1899 but 1898) engages its cast Underground in borderline sf activities beneath a South Pacific Island; his sf novel proper, A Fortune from the Sky (dated 1903 but 1902), features several ...
Doré, Gustave
(1832-1883) French painter and illustrator, far more successful in the latter capacity, as he was clearly inspired to do his best work by pre-existing texts, many of them fantastic; as a satirist he was also highly successful, though his targets were local (ie mid-nineteenth century France) and are relatively difficult to appreciate by a contemporary audience. At the same time, the constantly fantasticated exorbitance of his caricatures and other popular drawings underpins his more sustained ...
Robinson, Roger
(1943- ) UK computer programmer, bibliographer and publisher, active in UK Fandom for many years. The Writings of Henry Kenneth Bulmer (1983 chap; rev 1984 chap) is an exhaustive Bibliography of one of the most prolific sf writers, and Who's Hugh?: An SF Reader's Guide to Pseudonyms (1987) is similarly exhaustive in its listing of Pseudonyms. ...