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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 ...
Toys in SF
Extrapolations of children's Toys are encountered from time to time in science fiction, often to sinister effect. The ironic reversal of innocence that makes malign Children in SF such an effective trope extends to their dangerous, untrustworthy or subversive playthings. / The toys dumped into the twentieth century via Time Travel in Henry Kuttner's "Mimsy Were the ...
Hancock, H Irving
(1868-1922) US martial arts specialist, newspaper journalist and author, mostly for boys, and mostly under his own name, though he published some non-fantastic work as by Douglas Wells; he remains of sf interest for the Conquest of the United States Young Adult Future War sequence – comprising The Invasion of the United States, or Uncle Sam's Boys at the Capture of Boston (1916), ...
Andrews, John Williams
(1898-1975) US poet whose book-length sf poem, A.D. Twenty-One Hundred: A Narrative of Space (1969 chap) (see Poetry), is a kind of Future History of the next century or so, tracing the sophistication of Space Flight as the Moon is settled and Faster Than Light starships explore the Godless void; the poem closes in a ...
Bodelsen, Anders
(1937-2021) Danish author and journalist, author of many novels of suspense, several translated into English. He began to publish work of sf interest with Villa Sunset ["Villa Sunset"] (1964), a Near-Future tale of Fimbul-Winter and glacial transformation (see Climate Change). Frysepunktet (1969; trans Joan Tate as Freezing Point 1971; vt Freezing Down 1971) is also sf. ...
Clute, John
(1940- ) Canadian critic, editor and author, in the UK from 1969; married to Judith Clute from 1964, partner of Elizabeth Hand since 1996. His first professional publication was the long sf-tinged poem "Carcajou Lament" (Winter 1960 [ie Autumn 1959] Triquarterly), though he only began consistently publishing sf reviews in his "New Fiction" column for the Toronto Star (1966-1967), and sf ...