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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 ...
Smith, Phil
(? - ) UK illustrator and author; of his three sf novels, The Incredible Melting Man (1978) is a Tie to The Incredible Melting Man (1978); The Resurrection Machine (1978) and The Saxonbury Printout (1979) both play with cosmic themes: resurrection and time-space confusions. [JC]
Mason, Rhonda
(? - ) US editor and author who began to publish work of genre interest with a fantasy tale, "Love's Consequence" in Modern Magic (anth 2006) edited by W H Homer. Her first novel, The Empress Game (2015), is sf; though not exactly Young Adult in its orientation, as her female warrior protagonist is an experienced killer, the galactic tournament to the death (see ...
Adderley, James
(1861-1942) UK minister, amateur actor, social reformist and author, of whose novels Behold the Days Come: A Fancy in Christian Politics (1907) generates, through Near Future debates between Christians and Socialists, a unified Christian Socialism central to the shaping of a better world, whose beginnings are depicted through a Utopian vision of the English Garden City. [JC]
Pemberton, Victor
(1931-2017) UK actor, screenwriter, script editor and author of two Ties for the Doctor Who universe, Doctor Who: Fury from the Deep (1986) and Doctor Who: The Pescatons (1991). The first of these was based on his own script for the Who storyline "Fury from the Deep" (16 March 1968-20 April 1968), which introduced the Doctor's all-purpose McGuffin or ...
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 ...