SF Encyclopedia Home Page
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 ...
Superheroes
Superhero fiction is a genre based on many early models, but which crystallized in Comics; since then it has infiltrated the Cinema, Radio, Television and books. Stories involving figures with super (or at the least extraordinary) powers, and whose actions tend to keep the world safe, almost certainly existed, in some form, before Alexandre Dumas ...
Monsters [film]
Film (2010). Vertigo Films. Written and directed by Gareth Edwards. Cast includes Whitney Able and Scoot McNairy. 94 minutes. Colour. / A returning probe carrying samples from the geothermal oceans of Europa (see Jupiter) has crashed in central America, which is now infested with giant cephalopods in an international quarantine zone. Cynical photojournalist McNairy is reluctantly charged with delivering his boss's daughter (Able) to safety in the US before ...
Fisher, Vardis
(1895-1968) US author, raised in a Mormon family; his best-known single novel, Children of God (1939), is about the Mormons. His Testament of Man sequence covers the whole of human history, extending into many volumes the basic strategy which shapes several novels by F Britten Austin, the six volumes of Johannes V Jensen's The Long Journey (1922-1924) and other early-twentieth-century ...
Orban, Paul
American artist (1896-1974), born in Hungary, who often signed his work as Orban. After studying at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts from 1913 to 1917, he initially did illustrations for the Chicago Tribune and worked in advertising before moving to Mount Vernon, New York in 1930 to focus on providing a few covers and numerous interior illustrations for a wide range of Pulp magazines, with occasional assignments for more upscale venues like ...
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 ...