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 ...
Cowdrey, Albert E
(1933-2022) US author, much of whose nonfiction work, as an historian for the US Army Center of Military History, focused on the medical branches of the military; he ended this career as Chief of the Special History Branch of the US Army. As an author of fantasy and sf he began to publish work of genre interest with "The Lucky People" for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in February 1968 as by Chet Arthur, and continued under his own name with "The ...
Fuller, Ira C
(1828-1913) US businessman, photographer, psychic and author, several of whose works are nonfiction speculations in the occult. Poems and Essays [for full title see Checklist] (coll 1897) anonymous presents poems purportedly by famous authors (many dead) who conveyed them to the editor. Of sf interest is The Mysteries of the Formation of the Earth, the Rising and Sinking of Continents, the Introduction of Man and his Destiny Revealed, in God's Own Way and Time (1899) ...
Butler, William
(1929- ) US author best known for nonfantastic novels, some set in Japan. The Butterfly Revolution (1961), which is of sf interest, describes the almost instantaneous Dystopian tyranny created when a group of children "trapped" in a holiday camp take it over, a Satirical vision of an unhinged America which climaxes in the savage lynching of a Black camper (see ...
Homeostatic Systems
An item of sf Terminology borrowed from the pre-digital-Computer era of Cybernetics. A homeostatic system is a device which automatically maintains itself in a state of equilibrium, with input and output exactly balanced, using negative feedback devices to do so. The term originally came from physiology, for the human body itself has many homeostatic systems – perhaps more simply thought of, to ...
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. ...