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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.
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 ...
Zhao, Xiran Jay
(1997- ) Chinese-born author, in Canada from about the age of ten; they are of sf interest for the Iron Widow sequence beginning with the Young Adult Iron Widow (2021), where visual topoi from Anime enliven with deliberately garish exuberance an otherwise downbeat narrative. In a long fight against Mecha bent on ...
Mad Max
Film (1979). Mad Max Pty. Directed by George Miller. Written by James McCausland, Miller, based on a story by Miller. Cast includes Tim Burns, Mel Gibson, Hugh Keays-Byrne and Joanne Samuel. 100 minutes, cut to 91 minutes. Colour. / This low-budget exploitation movie builds up to the vigilante-style revenge of spaced-out policeman Max Rockatansky (Gibson) – who is almost as disturbed as his antagonists – on the motorcycle gang that ...
R H Esquire
(? -? ) Anonymous English author who produced the first Utopia to appear after the Restoration of Charles II. New Atlantis. Begun by the Lord Verulam, Viscount St Albans: And Continued by R.H. Esquire (1660), is a plausible, if less elegant, conclusion to Francis Bacon's New Atlantis: A Work Unfinished (bound in with Sylva Sylvarum 1626; 1627 chap). Picking ...
Brooks, Edwy Searles
(1889-1965) UK author, mostly of stories for boys in the earlier years of his career, from his first published story "Mr Dorien's Missing £2000" for Yes and No in 1907 into the 1930s, though he also wrote many Sexton Blake Library tales during these years; and mostly of adventure thrillers – including the 50 or more Norman Conquest books as by Berkeley Gray and the 30 or so Ironsides of the Yard books as by Victor Gunn ...
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 ...