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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.
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 ...
Beast Must Die, The
Film (1974; vt Black Werewolf). Amicus Productions and the British Lion Film Corporation. Directed by Paul Arnett. Written by Arnett (uncredited), Scott Finch (uncredited) and Michael Winder, based on "There Shall Be No Darkness" (April 1950 Thrilling Wonder Stories) by James Blish. Cast includes Tom Chadbon, Marlene Clark, Peter Cushing, Anton Diffring, Charles Gray, Michael Gambon, Calvin Lockhart and Ciaran Madden. 93 ...
Howrey, Meg
(? - ) US dancer and author whose first works of genre interest, the City of Dark Magic fantasy sequence beginning with City of Dark Magic (2012), was written as by Magnus Flyte in collaboration with Christina Lynch. She is of sf interest for The Wanderers (2017), a Near Future narrative whose protagonist, a female astronaut, finds life on Earth desolatingly hard at a time when ...
Self, Will
(1961- ) UK journalist and author who early established a name for savagely gonzo Satire, both in his fiction and his nonfiction, where his targets run from adversarial anatomies of the State of the Nation to similar explorations and exposés of his own psyche, sparing nothing in his descriptions of his early years of drug addiction, and of his erratically transgressive acts as a human being. His work in all genres has the scatological ...
Drummond, Bill
(1953- ) South-Africa born singer-songwriter, artist and author, in Scotland from infancy; for his musical partnership with Jimmy Cauty, see that entry. He is of sf interest for 2023: A Trilogy (2017) with Cauty, writing together as by The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu, which reconfigures the gonzo Paranoias of the original Illuminatus books by Robert Shea and ...
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 ...