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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.
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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 ...
Genone, Hudor
Pseudonym of US soldier, businessman and author William James Roe (1843-1921) for his sf and fantasy; he also produced some non-fantastic work under his own name and under other pseudonyms, including G I Cervus and Viroe. He was a freethinker – a disposition of mind found with surprising infrequency among nineteenth-century sf writers – and in an sf Satire, Inquirendo Island (1886), he dramatized in unmistakable terms his negative feelings ...
Gray, Claudia
Pseudonym of US lawyer and author Amy Vincent (1970- ), much of whose work has been paranormal romances for Young Adult readers, like the Evernight sequence beginning with Evernight (2008), a set of tales involving Vampires at a boarding school, but who has also written sf for the same market. The young protagonist of the Firebird sequence beginning with ...
Space Patrol [comic]
US Comic (1952). Two issues. Approved Comics, Inc (see Ziff-Davis). A spin-off from the tv series Space Patrol (1950-1955). Artists include Clarence Doore, Bernie Krigstein and Norman Saunders. Three Space Patrol and one other strip per issue. #2 also has an unsigned two-page article on H G Wells entitled "A Giant of Prophecy" (see ...
Roth, Philip
(1933-2018) US author, along with Thomas Pynchon the most influential writer of his generation still active well into the twenty-first century; he is probably still best known for Portnoy's Complaint (1969), a novel whose sophisticated and often comic treatment of the freedoms and imprisonments of Sex is fantastically furthered (see Fabulation) in The Breast (1972), in which a ...
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 ...