SF Encyclopedia Home Page
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.
Site updated on 4 December 2023
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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 ...
Waugh, Sylvia
(1935-2022), UK teacher, librarian, careers adviser and author whose first book was the children's fantasy The Mennyms (1993), about a miniature Wainscot Society comprising a single family living quasi-secretly in a house in the suburbs of some north-England town or City: the well-delineated family members are not human but magically animated life-size rag dolls, whose quiet existence is here seemingly endangered ...
Freitas, Emilia
(1855-1908) Brazilian author whose work has been rediscovered and re-evaluated in recent decades after many years in obscurity. She wrote poetry and articles from an early age, and was very active in the literary life of Fortaleza, the capital of her native State of Ceará, collaborating in Magazines and newspapers, while earning her living as a teacher in public schools in Fortaleza and also in Manaus (the capital of Amazonas) ...
Pollotta, Nick
Working name of US author Nicholas Angelo Pollotta (1954-2013), most of whose work in sf and other genres was under pseudonyms or House Names, including James Axler, Jack Hopkins and Don Pendleton, but who began publishing sf with Illegal Aliens (1989), with Phil Foglio providing extensive illustrations for this comic novel about a street gang in ...
Electric Light Orchestra
Also known as ELO. British pop-rock band, founded by Roy Wood (1946- ), Jeff Lynne (1947- ) and Bev Bevan (1944- ), whose full names are Roy Adrian Wood, Jeffrey Lynne and Beverley Bevan. ELO were notable for their skill at blending classical orchestral and pop-rock music idioms. The band's first single "10538 Overture" (1972) was not sf, despite a title that seems to contain a far-future date (in fact it is the number ...
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 ...