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 ...
Jones, Terry
(1942-2020) Welsh actor, comedian, screenwriter, film director and author (of historical as well as comic work) who after appearing in several earlier UK Television comedy series came to considerable prominence as a key member of Monty Python's Flying Circus (1969-1974) and was associated with many subsequent Python-team enterprises and performances. In Cinema, he was co-director ...
Mackelworth, R W
(1930-2000) UK author and insurance salesman who began publishing sf with "The Statue" for New Worlds in January 1963 and produced some above-average sf adventure novels, usually involving complex but rarely jumbled plotting, and an Earth somehow in danger. They include Firemantle (1968; vt The Diabols 1969), Tiltangle (1970), in which melodramatic Climate Change has confined humanity to ...
Kahn, Gustave
(1859-1936) French art critic and author, an important member of the Symbolist Movement, his colleagues including Henri de Régnier as well as more famous figures like Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-1898). His extravagantly couched Symbolist novel, Le Conte de l'Or et du Silence (first six chapters 1896 La Societé Nouvelle; 1898; trans Brian Stableford as ...
Fantastika
A convenient shorthand term employed and promoted by John Clute since 2007 to describe the armamentarium of the fantastic in literature as a whole, encompassing science fiction, Fantasy, fantastic horror and their various subgenres (see also Gothic SF; Horror in SF; SF Megatext), but not Proto SF. It is a ...
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 ...