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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 ...
Burgess, Mary Wickizer
(1938- ) US author, editor and bibliographer, wife of Michael Roy Burgess – that is, Robert Reginald of Borgo Press – from 1976 until his death. Often writing as Mary A Burgess, she collaborated with him on several 1980s essays collected in his Xenograffiti: Essays on Fantastic Literature (coll 1996); on other nonfiction including the Cinema study ...
Penrice, Arthur
Pseudonym of UK author George Theodosius Boughton Kyngdon (1821-1916). The narrator of Skyward and Earthward (1875), whose name is Arthur Penrice, travels to the Moon in an advanced Balloon, where he discovers a race of Telepaths living in caves; Penrice then travels to Mars, also inhabited. The second half of the tale is set tamely back on Earth. [JC]
Clark, Alan M
(1957- ) US illustrator and author, in the latter capacity mainly of horror, often in collaboration, beginning with Not Broken, Not Belonging (1994 chap), a novelette. His first novel, Promised (2005) with Jeremy Robert Johnson, is also horror, as is the Blood of Father Time sequence beginning with The New Cut (2007) with Stephen C Merritt and Lorelei Shannon. Some of his tales provide implied ...
Straczynski, J Michael
(1954- ) US Television producer, playwright, journalist and author, who began to publish work of genre interest with "A Last Testament for Nick and the Trooper" in Shadows 6 (anth 1983) edited by Charles L Grant; his first novel, Demon Night (1988), like most of his fiction not connected to his television work, has been horror; further titles include OtherSyde ...
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. ...