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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 ...
Nylund, Eric S
(1964- ) US author, primarily of fantasy in his more recent career; he is of sf interest primarily for the Jack Potter/Signal sequence comprising Signal to Noise (1998) and A Signal Shattered (1999), stories whose inexpressive style consorts oddly with the gonzo plotting of the (possibly incomplete) epic. In a world combining the Ruined Earth (California has sunk) and ...
Oblivion
American film (2013). Universal Pictures, Relativity Media, Monolith Pictures. Directed by Joseph Kosinski. Written by Karl Gajdusek and Michel Arndt from an unpublished Graphic Novel by Kosinski. Cast includes Tom Cruise, Morgan Freeman, Olga Kurylenko, Melissa Leo and Andrea Riseborough. 124 minutes. Colour. / In 2017, Earth at great cost beats off an Invasion from space by the Alien ...
Gilliam, Terry
(1940- ) US-born filmmaker, based in the UK from 1967; he became a British citizen in 1988. After editing a college humour magazine he became an editorial assistant and cartoonist on Harvey Kurtzmann's Help! from 1962 to 1965; after Help! folded he worked as an illustrator and copywriter for an agency in Los Angeles before moving to London to work on a short-lived magazine, The Londoner. On its demise he contributed sketches and art to television ...
Bedford, K A
(1963- ) Australian author whose sf novel, Orbital Burn (2003), complexly depicts an undead female detective (she is kept alive by Nanotechnology after a hacker has infected her biosystems) who is urged by a talking dog on the colony planet Kestrel to trace his master, an Android lad behind whose fabrication by Aliens lie secrets sufficient to save (or destroy) the ...
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. ...