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 ...
Smith, William Augustus
(? -? ) US author of His Pseudoic Majesty; Or, the Knights of the Fleece (1903), a Near Future novel whose sf underpinnings – in the main an idealized description of a hierarchical America free of the depredations of capitalism – are obscured by the allegorical recounting of the tale. [JC]
Synergy
US Original-Anthology series edited by George Zebrowski, published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. The first series ran for four volumes, all in paperback: Synergy: New Science Fiction Number One (anth 1987), Synergy: New Science Fiction Number Two (anth 1988), Synergy: New Science Fiction Number Three (anth 1989) and Synergy: New Science Fiction Number Four (anth ...
Mearson, Lyon
(1888-1966) Canadian-born art critic, screenwriter and author, in the US for many years, active in the Pulp magazines from about 1915; he wrote the script for Vengeance of the Dead (1917), an early film by Henry King (1886-1982). He is of sf interest for Phantom Fingers (1927), in which a Mad Scientist who commits apparently impossible crimes with the aid of ...
Redal, Javier
Working name of Spanish author Francisco Javier Redal (1952-2006), who was by profession a high school science teacher. He published four novels and two novellas in collaboration with Juan Miguel Aguilera plus a dozen solo short stories; they met in 1977, as Aguilera was a student in the same high school where he worked, and published together a school sf Fanzine entitled Módulo ["Module"]. Redal was a prolific ...
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 ...