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.
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 ...
Seaforth, A Nelson
Pseudonym of UK soldier, colonial administrator and author George Sydenham Clarke (1848-1933), who was appointed first Baron Sydenham of Combe in 1913, and whose ongoing interest in military matters inspired many articles (under his own name) on submarine warfare, the coining (as he claimed) of the term "imperial defense", and a Future-War novel, The Last Great Naval War (1891) as by A Nelson Seaforth, in which France and the UK become involved at ...
Interactive Narrative
The outcome of any given game is inherently uncertain, since it must be possible to win or lose (or, in the case of Toy Games, to play at will). Yet stories, as normally understood, should have a beginning, a middle and an end, and only one of each. Games which include stories – referred to in this encyclopedia as Interactive Narratives – have thus proved difficult to design. There has also been considerable debate as to whether it is desirable, or even ...
Ringdahl, Roar
(1935- ) Norwegian author and editor regarded as the Grand Old Man of Norwegian Fandom. Twelve years before the 1966 foundation of the Oslo Students' SF Club (Aniara), Ringdahl and Cato N Lindberg founded what was later called "The First Norwegian Fandom". In sf magazines of the time they found the addresses of foreign fanzines, and got in touch with some 200 sf fans in Sweden, the UK and the USA. Their first Fanzine ...
Seidenberg, Roderick
(1889-1973) German-born architect and author, in USA from 1910 or earlier; imprisoned 1918-1920 as a World War One conscientious objector. In the 1930s, while designing several buildings in New York, he also contributed essays to various journals. His first book, Posthistoric Man: An Inquiry (1950), incisively if adamantly argues that human history in the large scale is essentially predetermined, and can be graphed as a three-part sequence: ...
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 ...