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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 ...
Acriche, Marc Daniel
(? - ) US author whose first novel, the Young Adult Drained (2021), is set in a Near Future New York with a focus on municipal Politics, though strong hints of Climate Change put this in context. By 2048, a tyrannical mayor has transformed New York into a repressive city state; the ...
Matas, Carol
(1949- ) Canadian author, most of her work being directed to Young Adult readers, with a strong interest in the dramatizing of Jewish/Israeli issues. A considerable portion of her work is of sf interest, starting with her first novel, The DNA Dimension (1982), whose young cast is suddenly transmitted into a heavily regimented Dystopian ...
Lift, De
Film (1983; vt The Lift). Sigma Films. Directed by Dick Maas. Written by Mass; music by Maas. Cast includes Huub Stapel and Willeke Van Ammelrooy. 99 minutes. Colour. / This neat Dutch Horror film with an sf rationale, dubbed atrociously into English, tells of a homicidal lift (elevator) in a high-rise office building. The lift is controlled by an organic, living Computer (biochip), manufactured in Japan, which ...
Bien, H M
(1831-1895) German-born rabbi and author, in the US from an early age; his book of poems, Oriental Legends and Other Poems (coll 1883), contains some fantasy content. Of sf interest is Ben-Beor: A Story of the Anti-Messiah. In Two Divisions (1891; vt Ben-Beor: A Historical Story. In Two Divisions 1892), the first division of which involves a journey to the Moon by Elijah in a fiery chariot, the second of which engages with a ...
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 ...