SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Sunday 3 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 ...
Nielsen, Terese
(1966- ) American artist, her name sometimes misspelled as Therese, the ex-wife of artist Cliff Nielsen. After completing her training with a BFA degree from Pasadena's prestigious Art Center College of Design in 1991, she began doing artwork for comic books and gaming; and work related to role-playing games like Magic: The Gathering, rather than book covers, has remained her main source of income. Her work for comic books includes ...
Anarchy Online
Videogame (2001). Funcom. Designed by Gaute Godager, Ragnar Tørnquist. Platforms: Win. / Anarchy Online is a Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game which could be characterized as a form of shared Planetary Romance. It is set on the far future world of Rubi-Ka, where the morally suspect hypercorporation Omni-Tek is mining notum, ...
X-Ray Spex
UK punk act, founded 1976 and led by vocalist and songwriter Poly Styrene (Marianne Joan Elliott-Said) (1957-2011); the other members were guitarist Jak Airport (Jack Stafford) (circa 1955-2004), bassist Paul Dean, drummer Paul "B. P." Hurding and saxophonist Lora Logic (Susan Whitby) (1960- ), the last leaving after the first single, to be replaced by Steve "Rudi" Thompson. / That first single was "Oh Bondage! Up Yours!" (1977), opening demurely with ...
Le Queux, William
(1864-1927) UK journalist and author (his father was French), active contributor to newspapers from the mid-1880s, and author of over 200 books in a variety of genres. Most of his most popular works were espionage thrillers in the vein of E Phillips Oppenheim – a notorious confabulator, he claimed, unconvincingly, to be a spy himself – and detective novels, often with oriental colouring, beginning with Guilty Bonds (1890), about ...
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. ...