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
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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 ...
Hall, Louisa
(1982- ) US academic, poet and author who is of sf interest for her second novel, Speak (2015), a multi-voiced tale moderated and in part iterated by AIs, who have come to something like self-consciousness through a radical concept underlying their development: that consciousness is not generated by number-crunching but through the centripetal magnetism through time of storytelling. The figures depicted range from a young seventeenth ...
Wander over Yonder
US animated tv series (2013-2016). Disney Television Animation (see Disney on Television). Created by Craig McCracken. Directors include Dave Thomas and Eddie Trigueros. Writers include Francisco Angones, Robin Budd, Amy Higgins, Ben Joseph and Craig McCracken. Voice cast includes Jack McBrayer, Keith Ferguson, Tom Kenny, Noël Wells and April Winchell. 43 22-minute episodes (usually with two segments) and ...
Attwell, Sydney G
(1882-1975) South African author, resident in New Zealand, whose sf novel Drifting to Destruction (1927) predicts a Near Future Black uprising in his country of origin if its white rulers fail to alter their behaviour (see Race in SF). [JC]
Psi World
Role Playing Game (1984). Fantasy Games Unlimited. Designed by Delbert Carr, Cheron. / Psi World is characteristic of many early RPGs in its brevity and emphasis on rules over setting. The basic scenario is the same as that seen in many sf novels dealing with Espers. On a planet that is, or is similar to, near future Earth part of the population is evolving into a separate ...
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 ...