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Wednesday 6 December 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 ...
Samuel, Viscount
(1870-1963) UK politician, of progressive Liberal principles, and author; he was born Herbert Louis Samuel, knighted 1920, and made Viscount Samuel on 8 June 1937. His somewhat humourless public personality was satirized by H G Wells in The New Machiavelli (1911), and the notoriously antisemitic Hilaire Belloc also attacked him, accusing him falsely of corruption, which forced him to sue, successfully, for libel. As ...
Collier, Michael
(? - ) UK author of two unremarkable Doctor Who Ties, each referring to the Eighth Doctor: Doctor Who: Longest Day (1998) and Doctor Who: The Taint (1999). [JC]
Wernham, Mark
(? - ) UK journalist and author whose first novel, Martin Martin's on the Other Side (2008), is a Satire so gonzo and broad that it approaches slapstick Absurdist SF in its portrayal of the vaguely Near Future Britain, where the action unpacks. The protagonist Jensen Interceptor – hired by the government to track surviving acolytes of the late ...
McCaughrean, Geraldine
(1951- ) UK editor and author, usually for children and for Young Adult readers, though occasionally for a wider readership; most of her work has been fantasy, beginning with A Little Lower Than the Angels (1987), where a young stonemason is seconded by God to serve as an apprentice angel. In A Pack of Lies: Twelve Stories in One (coll of linked stories 1988), 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 ...