SF Encyclopedia Home Page
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.
Site updated on 27 November 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 ...
Scortia, Thomas N
(1926-1986) US chemist and author, active in solid-propellant research in the aerospace industry during the 1960s before becoming a full-time writer in 1970. He had already been publishing craftsmanlike stories for sixteen years, beginning with "The Prodigy" for Science Fiction Adventures in March 1954; known pseudonyms for short work in the sf magazines are Scott Nichols and Gerald MacDow (Arthur R Kurtz has also been given as a Scortia ...
Gibbons, Cromwell
(1893-1977) US author – probably the working name of Francis Cromwell Gibbons, a chemical engineer whose two-book thriller sequence featuring the Pulp magazine-style para-legal scientific detective Rex Huxford comprises Murder in Hollywood (1936) – set amid the California film industry, with some mildly speculative radio Communications – and The Bat Woman ...
Pournelle, Jerry
(1933-2017) US author with PhDs from the University of Washington in psychology (1960) and political science (1964); he was employed for fifteen years in the US space programme, working for both government and private firms, and at one time was a political campaign manager. Before entering sf, Pournelle wrote some technical nonfiction and some fiction, occasionally using pseudonyms and House Names. His first books were a nonfiction text, ...
Odell, Samuel W
(1864-1948) US lawyer and author of two sf books, Atlanteans; Adam Lore's Choice: Stories for Young Men (coll 1889) and The Last War; Or, The Triumph of the English Tongue [for full title see Checklist] (1898). In the latter, a Future-War story set in the twenty-sixth century, the highly civilized all-White Allied Anglo-American Nations decide, more in sorrow, to engage in "war to the end" against a miscegenate evil empire controlled ...
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 ...