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.
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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 ...
Keppel-Jones, Arthur
(1909-1996) South African-born historian and author, in Canada from 1959, whose When Smuts Goes: A History of South Africa from 1952 to 2010: First Published in 2015 (1947) takes a gloomy view of the future of that country, analysing the mind-set of white South Africans, who invoke "trek" and kraal metaphors to assert, in a clear denial of reality, that Black aspirations to self-government could be countered by a resolute pioneering spirit. In the novel, the Nationalist Party is ...
Almond, David
(1951- ) UK author, much of his work being nonfantastic, though illuminated by hints that the seemingly ordinary world cannot be fully understood in mundane terms; most of his early work was written for a Young Adult readership; some later titles have been released in both young adult and adult formats. His first stories were assembled as Sleepless Nights (coll 1985) and A Kind of Heaven (coll 1997); his first ...
Genius Party
A two-volume Japanese Original Video Animation (OVA) anthology series produced by Studio 4°C, who also created the Sweat Punch OVA anthology. The director/writer is shown in brackets after each segment title. / 1. Genius Party (2007). / Comprising seven short films, 102 minutes in total. Colour. / Genius Party (Atsuko Fukushima). In a strange desert a shaman in bird guise interacts with egg-shaped skulls. After some ...
X-Files and Other Eerie TV, The
US letter-size saddle-stapled Media Magazine printed on a mix of newsprint and slick paper. Publisher: Starlog Communications. No editor named. One issue: December 1995. / The 1990s success of the Television series The X-Files (1993-2002) gave rise to a number of publications devoted entirely to this programme. A few of these also carried material on other productions, as ...
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 ...