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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 ...
Diderot, Denis
(1713-1784) French philosopher, editor and author who edited and wrote (with Jean le Rond d'Alembert until 1759) the Encylopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, par une société de gens de lettres ["Encyclopedia: or a Systematic Dictionary of the Sciences, Arts, and Crafts, by a Company of Men of Letters"] (1751-1772 28vols), an Enlightenment masterpiece. Diderot's insistence on a single alphabet, avowedly ...
Harris, Raymond
(1953- ) US author who began publishing sf with his first novel, The Broken Worlds (1986), an attractive picaresque adventure. Shadows of the White Sun (1988) seems at first assessment almost too complex – it is set in a Far-Future solar system dominated by revenant star-sailors whose descendants occupy seven Space Habitats called the Hypaethra, orbiting the Sun, while a ...
Innes, Hammond
(1913-1998) UK journalist and author of adventure novels, who wrote nonfantastic children's adventure tales as by Ralph Hammond. His earliest work was exclusively devoted to the Peter Deveril sequence of thrillers beginning with the nonfantastic The Doppelganger (1936), featuring a newspaper reporter and criminologist whose investigations sometimes hover at the edge of the fantastic through Inventions involving improbable ...
Cast, Kristin
(1986- ) US author, almost exclusively of Young Adult fantasy, much of it with her mother P C Cast, most prominently their House of Night sequence beginning with Marked (2007), set in an Alternate History version of America inhabited by both homo sapiens and "vampyres" (see Vampires), the latter being genetic sports ...
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 ...