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 ...
Jones, R G
(1889-1969) Working name of American illustrator Robert Gibson Jones. After some art training in Chicago, he worked mostly in advertising for two decades before becoming, in 1942, a regular cover artist for Ziff-Davis publications. In addition to covers for their non-genre titles like Mammoth Adventure, Mammoth Detective, and Mammoth Western, Jones painted 90 covers for Amazing Stories and ...
Schulman, Audrey
(1963- ) Canadian author whose sixth novel, the Near Future Theory of Bastards (2018), focuses primarily on a speculative study, and complex intercourse with, a family of bonobos (see Apes as Human; Biology; Zoo) caged in a research institute; the free-form non-agonistic Sex enjoyed by these "animals" provides a model ...
Kastle, Herbert D
(1924-1987) US author best known outside the genre, who began publishing occasional sf stories with "The York Problem" in If for February 1955. He edited the final two issues of Startling Stories (Summer and Fall 1955). His one sf novel, The Reassembled Man (1964; exp vt Edward Berner Is Alive Again! 1975; vt The Three Lives of Edward Berner 1976) depicts without excessive originality the ...
Yoshioka Hitoshi
(1960-2023) Japanese author closely associated with the visual media, whose vast output and populist panderings often occlude his deeper efforts at Satire and more mature experiments in Recursive SF. Dropping out of Waseda University partway through a literature degree, he worked part-time at the Anime company Studio Hard, and made his professional debut novelizing the non-sf film ...
Nicholls, Peter
(1939-2018) Australian editor and author, primarily a critic and historian of sf through his creation and editing of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction [see below]; resident in the UK 1970-1988, in Australia from 1988; worked as an academic in English literature (1962-1968, 1971-1977), scripted television documentaries, was a Harkness Fellow in Film-making (1968-1970) in the USA, worked as a publisher's editor (1982-1983), often broadcast film and book reviews on BBC Radio from 1974 and ...