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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 ...
Watson, Frederick
(1885-1935) UK publisher and author who also wrote as by Ian Ferguson and John Ferguson. He is of sf interest for The Ghost Rock; Or, White Man's Gold (1912; vt The Treasure of the Hills circa 1920s), a Lost Race tale narrated by a young man whose exceedingly vigorous inventor uncle (see Inventions) – who may have been moulded on Watson's father, John Watson (1850-1907), a notoriously if genially ...
Droid [2]
Also known as "{species}droid" and "{species}DROID". US electro-funk band, whose debut release The Systematik Eviloution of {species}DROID (2005) mashes genre topics into an eclectic musical hybrid of contemporary dance styles. The name is presumably based on the sf coinage Droid as popularized in Star Wars (1977). [AR]
Covell, Ian
(1953-2019) UK author, bibliographer, book dealer and university administrator who first began to publish work of genre interest with "Some Notes on British Authors" for The Science-Fiction Collector in July 1977. Interviews with John Brunner, Michael Moorcock and Bob Shaw appeared in ...
Gerard, Francis
(1905-1966) UK author born Francis Edward Marie Gerard (surname was sometimes spelled Gérard; he dropped the Marie in adult life), in South Africa after World War Two; most of his works are thrillers, some of them continuations of Edgar Wallace's nonfantastic Sanders of the Rivers tales; several of them featuring Sir John Meredith, an eminent Occult Detective [see The ...
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 ...