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 ...
Stine, Alison
(1978- ) US poet and author, active from the turn of the century; of her poetry, Ohio Violence (coll of linked poems 2009 chap) contains fantastic elements. Her first novel, Supervision (2015), is a Young Adult fantasy set in semi-rural Appalachian Ohio, whose protagonist, finding herself sent by her family into exile there, discovers that she has become invisible (see ...
Brown, Jerry Earl
(1940- ) US author in whose first sf novel, Under the City of Angels (1981), a sunken California is delved by the haunted protagonist, who finds powerful corporations and Aliens at the root of things. In Darkhold (1985), a man engages in a Godgame enterprise to Clone five lovers for himself in a kind of ...
Kingsnorth, Paul
(1972- ) UK journalist and author, active from the early 1990s, much of whose nonfiction has dealt with the planetary environment, his earlier work focusing on Ecology as such, though the devouring issue of Climate Change clearly became of increasing concern. He is of sf interest for the Buccmaster trilogy comprising The Wake (2015), Beast (2017) and Alexandria ...
Timlin, William M
(1892-1943) UK-born architect, illustrator and author, in South Africa from 1912. The Ship that Sailed to Mars: A Fantasy (graph 1923), his only fiction, is more fantasy than sf, though it does describe in glowing detail the fitting up of a Spaceship and its trip to Mars, where extravagant Monsters are encountered. But Timlin's astonishingly evocative illustrations to the text – for which ...
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 ...