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.
Site updated on 4 December 2023
Sponsor of the day: Terrence Somerville
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 ...
Lost Planet Airmen
US film (1951). Republic Pictures. Directed by Fred C. Brannon. Written by Royal K Cole and William Lively. Cast includes Mae Clarke, Tristram Coffin, James Craven, I. Stanford Jolley and House Peters, Jr. 65 minutes. Black and white. This was an abridged version of the 12-part (167 minutes in total) Republic Pictures Serial Film King of the Rocket Men (1949), though slightly reworked (see below). / Reporter Glenda Thomas (Clarke) is ...
Infinity [magazine]
UK Media Magazine, current, first issue dated April 2017, letter-sized (A4), stapled, continuously numbered, on slick paper throughout, published monthly. / Infinity is published by Ghoulish Publishing Ltd and has been edited since its launch by Allan Bryce. The magazine does not publish fiction, and concentrates on nostalgic articles about cult Cinema and Television, some genre examples ...
Edelman, Scott
(1955- ) US editor and author, his fiction having had perhaps unduly little recognition, almost certainly because his work shifts from horror to fantasy to sf without any marketing consistency; his first work of genre interest was "Guinea Pigs" for Fantasy Book in May 1983. The stories assembled in Suicide Art (coll 1992 chap) are horror, though some tales in These Worlds Are Haunted (coll 2001) are sf; various ...
Wratislaw, A C
(1862-1938) UK member of the British diplomatic corps and author in whose comic sf tale, King Charles & Mr Perkins (1931), a Time Machine transports Perkins to Restoration England and retrieves him just before he would have been executed. [JC]
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 ...