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
Sponsor of the day: Andy Richards of Cold Tonnage Books
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 ...
Souvestre, Émile
(1806-1854) French teacher, journalist and author whose seeming Utopia, Le Monde Tel Qu'il Sera (1846; trans Margaret Clarke as The World as It Shall Be 2004), gives a complexly Satirical portrait of the world its protagonists have attained via a lengthy period of death-like Suspended Animation, making their Sleeper-Awakes revival in ...
Mandeville, Colin
Pseudonym used by UK economist and author Anthony Dalston Dawson (1927- ) for his novel, The Last Days of New York (1980), in which unbalanced speculative profligacy (see Economics) sufficiently undermines New York for the city to collapse. [JC]
van Loden, Erle
Pseudonym used for sf by Ernest Lister Hale Willis (1919-1988), UK teacher, Television director and author who was very prolific in the last capacity under a number of bylines, his principal working name being Lisle Willis. He began to publish work of genre interest as by van Loden with "Demons of Daavol" in the 1952 Wonders of the Spaceways #5 from John Spencer and Co (see ...
Kaye, Marvin
(1938-2021) US editor and author, usually of fantasy and horror; early in his career, he wrote some stories with Brother Theodore, a chess player and stage monologuist born Theodore Gottlieb (1906-2001), at some point thought to be a Kaye pseudonym. He edited numerous anthologies [see Checklist below], H.P. Lovecraft's Magazine of Horror (Spring 2004-Spring 2009) and Weird Tales (which see) from 2011 to 2014. ...
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. ...