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 ...
Bennet, Robert Ames
(1870-1954) US author who concentrated on Westerns, and author of four novels of sf interest. In Thyra: A Romance of the Polar Pit (1901), three explorers, after nearly freezing to death, discover a Balloon which conveys them to a clement Lost World, hidden near the North Pole and full of prehistoric beasts, bestial ape-men (see Apes as Human), clairvoyant ...
Ruritania
Imaginary countries are common in the literatures of the world, but only some can properly be called Ruritanian. In The Prisoner of Zenda (1894) by the UK author Anthony Hope, Rudolf Rassendyll, a leisured and insouciant young Britisher of the 1890s, travels on a whim, via Paris and Dresden, to the small, feudal, independent, German-speaking middle-European kingdom of Ruritania, located somewhere east-southeast of the latter city. Here he ...
Crane, Nathalia
(1913-1998) US poet, teacher and author, precociously active as a poet from childhood, beginning with the publication of her first collection, The Janitor's Boy and Other Poems (coll 1924 chap), which was much influenced by Emily Dickinson (1830-1886); Time magazine referred to her at this time as "The Baby Browning of Brooklyn". After publishing some further work she enjoyed a long career as an academic and political activist. Samuel R ...
Imperialism
Throughout its history, from its Proto SF origins until well into the twentieth century, sf has had a close and complex involvement with the themes of colonialism and empire. It is indeed a relationship so intimate and accustomed that it has not evoked sufficient attention as a separate issue; early editions of this encyclopedia, for instance, had no entry on the subject, though germane comments could be found dispersed throughout the text, often associated in one ...
Robinson, Roger
(1943- ) UK computer programmer, bibliographer and publisher, active in UK Fandom for many years. The Writings of Henry Kenneth Bulmer (1983 chap; rev 1984 chap) is an exhaustive Bibliography of one of the most prolific sf writers, and Who's Hugh?: An SF Reader's Guide to Pseudonyms (1987) is similarly exhaustive in its listing of Pseudonyms. ...