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 ...
Bulgaria
The roots of Bulgarian sf can be found in the 1920s, when Svetoslav Minkov published three unusual collections of short stories: Siniata Hrizantema ["The Blue Chrysanthemum"] (coll 1921), Tshasovnik ["Clock"] (coll 1924) and Ognena Ptitza ["The Fire Bird"] (coll 1927). Minkov's work noticeably resembles that of Edgar Allan Poe, H P Lovecraft and ...
Hodgson, John
(1881-1936) UK inventor and author, whose vision of various forms of Utopia via Time Travel, The Time-Journey of Dr. Barton. An Engineering and Sociological Forecast based on Present Possibilities (1929 chap), attractively posits a world delivered from excesses of Technology by a cadre of technocrats; The Great God WASTE (1933) is a less-fictionalized disquisition on some of ...
Cinefex
US Cinema perfect-bound 8 x 9 in magazine printed on slick paper in similar format to a trade paperback. Published by Don Shay/Cinefex LLC. Editors John Duncan, others. 1980-current. Quarterly. / Cinefex grew largely out of publisher Shay's love for the films and visual effects work of Willis H O'Brien and over the years has remained a cornerstone magazine for those interested in state-of-the-art cinematic effects. It ...
Peddie, James
(? -? ) Scottish author, much of whose output was nonfiction under various names about games. His sf novel is Capture of London (1887 chap), in which the Invasion of London, after the general model of the Battle of Dorking tales, is in this case accomplished via a Channel tunnel. [JC]
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 ...