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Thursday 7 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 ...
Gratacap, Louis Pope
(1851-1917) US naturalist, museum curator and author whose first writings were nonfiction essays like "The Ice Age" for the Popular Science Monthly in 1878. His first sf novel, The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars: Being the Posthumous Papers of Bradford Torrey Dodd (1903), remains his best known. Dying in the conviction that dead humans transcendentally ascend to a Martian Reincarnation as embodied spirits, the narrator's father is soon ...
About Time
UK film (2013). Universal Pictures. Written and directed by Richard Curtis. Cast includes Lindsay Duncan, Domhnall Gleeson, Tom Hollander, Rachel McAdams, Bill Nighy and Margot Robbie. 123 minutes. Color. / Shortly after his twenty-first birthday, Tim (Gleeson) is told by his father (Nighy) that the men in their family have the ability to Time Travel within the limits of their own past. Tim uses this knowledge to win the affections of Mary (McAdams), ...
Langford, George
(1876-1964) US industrialist, amateur palaeontologist and author of several Prehistoric SF tales for juvenile readers (see Children's SF), beginning with the two Pic the Weapon-Maker tales, Pic the Weapon-Maker (1920) and Kutnar, Son of Pic (1921), set 25,000 years ago and featuring what may be Telepathic rapport with mammoths; ...
Applegate, K A
(1956- ) US author of sf and fantasy for children, almost exclusively through the medium of three extended series, which include some inbuilt sub-series. She is best-known for the Animorphs sequence, beginning with Animorphs: The Invasion (1996) and ending with Animorphs: The Beginning (2001), featuring the exploits of a group of adolescent children who use their Shapeshifter powers, which have been ...
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 ...