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.
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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 ...
Gordon, Jane
(? - ) UK author of Stepford Husbands (1996), an sf Satire in which a scientist offers to treat the husbands of four frustrated women with the new Drug Manifold, which will make them malleable; the consequences are various. [JC]
Hill, Matt
(1984- ) UK author who also writes as M T Hill; his first novel, The Folded Man (2013), depicts a Dystopian Near Future Manchester, desiccated through political betrayals by the London-based national government, and run by corrupt exploiters of the Midlands population; the protagonist, through his belief that he is in fact a mermaid, lightens the texture of the tale. His second novel, also set in ...
McCoy, Nathaniel P
Pseudonym of UK art publisher and author George Grandison Millar (circa 1860-1913), whose The Gold Makers (1911) is a thriller involving the Transmutation of metals. In real life Millar was a shareholder of the Scottish metallurgical company Kosmoid Ltd [see links below], established in 1904, which planned to produce mercury and perhaps gold by transmutation of lead; The Gold Makers is seemingly a roman à clef ...
Popov, Alexander
(1954- ) Bulgarian sf author and publisher who has won awards for his short fiction, some written under the pseudonym Al Vickers, some translated into foreign languages. His sf novel «Provinzia Pet» ["Province Five"] as by Al Vickers was contracted in 1991 for publication in Russian translation in Russia. His recently established Gemini publishing house began, in 1991, to publish a fortnightly sf magazine, Drugi Svetove ["Other Worlds"]. Popov wrote the ...
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 ...