SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 28 November 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 27 November 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 ...
Reed, Kit
(1932-2017) US author – her name was legally changed from Lilian Craig Reed – as well known for her work outside sf and fantasy as for her prolific output within the water margins of modern Fantastika. Her fluency among the modes of the modern was remarkable [all her titles are therefore given in the Checklist below]. She wrote one horror novel, Blood Fever (1986), as by Shelley Hyde, and three detections – Gone ...
Bawden, Edward
(1903-1989) UK painter and illustrator, conspicuously versatile and active from the mid-1920s to the end of his life; his vivid graphic style – in which spaces and perspectives are controlled through powerfully architectonic linear patterning enabled through his innovative skill as a lino cutter – became very widely known in Britain. He provided illustrations and covers for several books of genre interest, including (by dates of editions he illustrated) Lance de Giberne ...
Blum, Yoav
(1978- ) Israeli software developer and author whose first translated novel, Metsarfe ha-miòkrim (2011; trans Ira Moskowitz as The Coincidence Makers 2018), in which (in a traditional sf sense) a group of young men and women exercise their professional skill, which resembles Psi Powers: the ability to create coincidences and events binding on the future, under the control of a ...
Shurkin, Joel N
(1938- ) US journalist (winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1979) and author whose very Near Future medical Technothriller, Helix (1979) with Desmond Ryan, extrapolates from the real effects of Legionnaire's Disease to depict a virulent nationwide Pandemic. [JC]
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 the long sf-tinged poem "Carcajou Lament" (Winter 1960 [ie Autumn 1959] Triquarterly), though he only began consistently publishing sf reviews in his "New Fiction" column for the Toronto Star (1966-1967), and sf ...