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Tuesday 28 November 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 ...
Kirkbride, John
(? - ) UK author, not to be confused with the UK singer-songwriter John Kirkbride (1946- ); his Young Adult novel, Life on Urth (1994), carries its young protagonists to a Parallel World that turns out to be a comic Parody of Earth. Adventures accumulate winningly from this point. [JC]
Sketchley, Arthur
Pseudonym of UK playwright and author George Rose (1817-1882), the first of whose series of comic sketches presenting the erratic lower-class opinions of Mrs Brown was "How Mrs Brown Spent Christmas Day" (in Routledge's Annual, anth 1866). Her responses to George T Chesney's The Battle of Dorking (1871 chap), which she believes to be factual, are given in Mrs Brown on the Battle of Dorking (1871 chap) (see ...
McCoy, Andrew
Working name of South African-born author André Jute McCoy (1945- ), in Australia from the 1960s, who has concentrated as McCoy on violent tales of conflict in the continent of his birth, most of them verging into the Near Future. These include Atrocity Week (1978), The Insurrectionist (1979), which describes a future rising of Blacks against the South African government, African Revenge ...
Weiner, Andrew
(1949-2019) UK-born psychologist and author, in Canada after 1973, who began publishing sf with "Empire of the Sun" in Again, Dangerous Visions (anth 1972) edited by Harlan Ellison, but who became significantly active only in the early 1980s, with thirty stories released in that decade. About half of his work was assembled in Distant Signals, and Other Stories (coll 1989), "Distant Signals" (May/June 1984 ...
Clute, John
(1940- ) Canadian critic, editor and author, in the UK from 1969; married to Judith Clute from 1964, partner of Elizabeth Hand since 1996. His first professional publication was the long sf-tinged poem "Carcajou Lament" (Winter 1960 [ie Autumn 1959] Triquarterly), though he only began consistently publishing sf reviews in his "New Fiction" column for the Toronto Star (1966-1967), and sf ...