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 ...
Eisenstein, Alex
(1945- ) US author and illustrator whose fiction has been exclusively in collaboration with his wife, Phyllis Eisenstein, beginning with "The Trouble with the Past" for New Dimensions 1 (anth 1971) edited by Robert Silverberg; although only between five and ten stories are bylined with both names, their collaborative efforts extend throughout her work. Eisenstein is specifically ...
SF Magazines
Sf stories were a popular and prominent feature of such general-fiction Pulp magazines as The Argosy and The All-Story during the first quarter of the twentieth century. They were not, however, known as sf: if there were any need to differentiate them, the terms Scientific Romance or "different stories" might be used, but until the appearance of a ...
Miller, Sam J
(1979- ) US author who began publishing work of genre interest with "Haunting Your House" in The Red Volume: An Anthology of Stories by the Awkward Robots (anth 2008 ebook) edited by The Awkward Robots, most of his early work being fantasy or horror, though his first novel, the Young Adult The Art of Starving (2017), Equipoisally offers hints as well of an sf explanation for the ...
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
(1809-1894) US poet, essayist, editor, medical doctor and author, of sf interest in the latter capacity for Elsie Venner: A Romance of Destiny (January 1860-April 1861 The Atlantic Monthly as "The Professor's Story"; 1861 2vols), in which the classic fantasy and supernatural topos of the Lamia is reconstructed in terms of Biology: the eponymous young female, having been "poisoned" in the womb with rattlesnake venom (see ...
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. ...