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 ...
Year 24 Group
["Nijūyo-nen-gumi"] Critical shorthand used in Japanese Manga Fandom and academia to describe the community of female creators who transformed girls' comics in the 1970s, making a striking and enduring impact on multiple genres, including sf (see Women SF Writers). The name derives from the happenstance that several of the prime movers in the field were born in or around ...
Tenney, Steven R
(? - ) US author of Persona: Life on the Fast Lane in 2007 (1993; rev vt Persona: The Ultimate Identity Crisis in 2014 1995), an anatomy of the Near Future as experienced by a young woman. [JC]
Sternbach, Rick
Working name of American artist Richard Michael Sternbach (1951- ), born in Connecticut. He left the University of Connecticut after three years to begin working as an artist and garnered his first sf assignment in 1973, for the October 1973 issue of Analog, illustrating G Harry Stine's article "A Program for Space Flight" with interior art and a cover depicting two spherical spacecraft near an enormous planet. ...
Janson, Gustaf
(1866-1913) Swedish painter and author, whose pacifist novel, Lögnerna: berättelser om kriget ["The Lies: Tales of the War"] (1912; trans anon as Pride of War 1912), is set mostly in the Turco-Italian war of 1911-1912, but climaxes with a vivid depiction of a Future War in the air as waged by Germany. [JC]
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 ...