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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 ...
Krol, Torsten
(? - ) Australian author, whose reclusiveness has led to unconfirmed speculations that Torsten Krol is a pseudonym. His first novel, The Dolphin People (2006) skirts the fantastic in its depiction of the extreme behaviour of a German family (including at least one war criminal) whose plane has crashed in the Amazonian jungle just after World War Two, and who must convince the tribe that discovers them that ...
Farca, Marie C
(1935- ) US author whose first sf novel, Earth (1972), is a competent adventure involving an ecologically-sound culture attempting to cope with a Ruined Earth from within a Keep; confusingly, this planet, which the protagonist Andrew Ames has discovered, is called Earth, just as is Ames's home planet. The sequel, Complex Man (1973), is set on another planet (not called Earth), ...
Haddad, Hubert
(1947- ) Tunisian-born poet, playwright and author, in France from 1950, active as a poet from the mid-1960s. His fiction is generically various, and may often be defined in terms of its diverse and ambitious transactions between myth and the quotidian (see Fantastika). He is of specific sf interest for Corps désirable (2015; trans Alyson Waters as Desirable Body 2018), whose protagonist, after suffering ...
Brown, Slater
(1896-1997) US author, perhaps best known as "B", E E Cummings's cellmate in his famous memoir of World War One, The Enormous Room (1922). Brown's own writing career was relatively desultory, though he published at least two books of genre interest: The Talking Skyscraper (1945) is a children's tale about a New York skyscraper dissatisfied with its (his) lot; Spaceward Bound (1955) is a ...
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 ...