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 ...
Two Lost Worlds
Film (1951). Sterling Productions, Inc. Produced by Boris Petroff. Directed by Norman Dawn. Dinosaur stock footage by Roy Seawright from One Million B.C. (1940). Written by Tom Hubbard from a story by Phyllis Parker and Boris Petroff (uncredited). Cast includes James Arness (credited as James Aurness), Bill Kennedy, Gloria Petroff, Kasey Rogers (credited as Laura Elliott) and Michael Rye (credited as Rye Billsbury). Narrator: Dan Riss. 61 ...
Watchmen
1. Perhaps the most famous of all Graphic Novels, written by Alan Moore and illustrated by Dave Gibbons. Watchmen appeared initially as a twelve-part Comic (September 1986-October 1987 Watchmen), each part corresponding to a chapter of the full novel, which was published as Watchmen (graph 1987; with additional material 1988). ...
Popular Science Fiction
Australian thin (64pp) Digest-size saddle-stapled magazine. Six issues, undated but July 1953 to March 1955, published by Frew Publications, Sydney; editor not named, but Ronald Forster. It published primarily reprints from US pulps but included some new Australian material by Norma K Hemming and, surprisingly, by US authors, particularly in the final issue which was almost all new material, by Sam Sackett, Jim ...
Tarzan
This potent twentieth-century myth, created by Edgar Rice Burroughs in Tarzan of the Apes (October 1912 All-Story; 1914), may seem only marginally sf on the strength of the detail that Tarzan – who is both Lord Greystoke, scion of English aristocracy, and Pastoral lord of the African jungle – was raised by great apes (see ...
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 ...