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
Sponsor of the day: Andy Richards of Cold Tonnage Books
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 ...
Lone Star
Shortlived Welsh rock band whose debut album Lone Star (1976) is of some genre interest: the tracks "A Million Stars" ("We can take a trip to a million stars / We can take a sky-train to Jupiter and Mars"), "A New Day" and "Spaceships" are fairly accomplished space-operatic thumbnails (see Space Opera). A second album Firing On All Six (1977) is less assured, and the group broke up soon after. [AR] links / ...
Weird and Occult Library
UK pocketbook magazine, three numbered, undated issues 1960; published by G G Swan, London; no editor named, but was Gerald Swan (1902-1981). Weird and Occult contained a mixture of weird, sf and mystery stories, most of which had been gathering dust in Swan's drawer since World War Two. Unlike its companion, Science Fiction Library, the fiction was mostly by British writers including A M Burrage and John Russell ...
Villeneuve, Denis
(1967- ) Canadian film director and screenwriter. Born in Bécancour, Quebec, into a Francophone family, Villeneuve has directed both French- and English-language films. He began making short films while in high school and later pursued film studies at the Université du Québec à Montréal. He is the director of the big-budget sf movies Arrival (2016), ...
Gresh, Lois H
(1956- ) US author who began publishing work of genre interest with "CAFEBABE" (in Infinite Loop, anth 1993, ed Larry Constantine), and who has written fiction and nonfiction for both adult and Young Adult audiences, beginning with a Near Future Technothriller The Termination Node (1999) with Robert E ...
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 ...