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
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 ...
Kavan, Anna
Name under which French-born, much travelled UK painter and author born Helen Emily Woods (1901-1968) wrote all her later fiction, her first six novels (1929-1937) being published under her married name, Helen Ferguson; the orphaned protagonist of Let Me Alone (1930) and A Stranger Still (1935) is named Anna Kavan, and after 1938 Edmonds went by that name, signing all her later books Anna Kavan (though she did not, as has been suggested, change her name by deed ...
Space and Time
US low-paying Semiprozine that began as an Amateur Magazine and is now the longest continuously published non-professional SF Magazine. Published and edited by Gordon Linzner, New York, from Spring 1966, with the assistance of Nestor Jaremko and others for the first few issues, and with Jani Anderson as co-editor from #75 (Winter 1989) to #80 (Summer 1992). Linzner passed it on to Hildy ...
McNelly, Willis E
(1920-2003) US academic, sf critic and editor long based at California State University at Fullerton, where he gave what were among the earlier sf classes in the USA. His anthologies include the Mars-themed Mars, We Love You (anth 1971; vt The Book of Mars 1976) edited with Jane Hipolito, Above the Human Landscape: A Social Science Fiction Anthology (anth 1972) edited with Leon E Stover and ...
Hunt, H L
(1889-1974) Polyprogenitive US oil tycoon, and author of the Alpaca sequence comprising Alpaca (1960) and Alpaca Revisited (1967), which begins as a romantic excursion into the eponymous Utopian kingdom, then becomes a more formal set of arguments designed to keep lands such as Alpaca free from dictators. Chief among these is the suggestion that voting rights be weighted in favour of the age and wealth of the voter. Taxes will be ...
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 ...