SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Sunday 10 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.
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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 ...
Collier, James Lincoln
(1928- ) US author of works for children, many of them nonfiction, and the best-known of them being several historical novels written with his brother, Christopher Collier (1930-2020). Of sf interest is Planet Out of the Past (1983), whose young protagonists on the planet Pleisto find relics of a human prehistoric society; and The Empty Mirror (2004), a Doppelganger fantasy. He was the nephew of Slater ...
Boyd, John
Pseudonym of Boyd Bradfield Upchurch (1919-2013), US sf author employed 1947-1971 as a production manager and salesman for the Star Engraving Company, and active in the sf field for a decade following publication of his first novel, The Last Starship From Earth (1968), during which period he published thirteen novels and just one short sf story, "The Girl and the Dolphin" (March 1973 Galaxy). The Last Starship From Earth, which received ...
Forrest, Henry J
(1823-1899) UK compositor, printer's reader, journalist and author of an early sf Utopia, A Dream of Reform (1848), which tamely introduces the usual visitor to a mildly socialist planet designed on anti-industrial lines. The book is thus a vague precursor to the work of William Morris. [JC]
Varoufakis, Yanis
(1961- ) Greek economist, politician and professor, holder of an Australian passport from 2000, formerly the Greek Minister of Finance and co-author of the polemic A Modest Proposal for Resolving the Euro Crisis (2010) – see Jonathan Swift. As an academic, he acquired postgraduate degrees in mathematical statistics and economics at British universities, and taught in Australia, Greece, the UK and the USA before ...
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 ...