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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 ...
Pollock, A W A
(1853-1923) UK soldier and author, an army officer from 1875 until the end of World War One; he is of sf interest for two Future War tales, Lord Roastem's Campaign in North-Eastern France With Sketch Map (1911 chap), which describes a series of imaginary battles, and In the Cockpit of Europe (1913) which specifically adumbrates World War One, with Britain coming to the aid of a beleaguered France. [JC]
Thomas, Theodore L
(1920-2005) US author and lawyer, prolific in the magazines under his own name, which he sometimes rendered as Ted Thomas, and as Leonard Lockhard, the pseudonym he used for his Patent Attorney spoof series (eight stories 1952-1964 in Astounding/Analog), some of which were with Charles L Harness, including The Professional Approach (September 1962 Analog; ...
Merlin Nostradamus
Pseudonym of Irish author Frances Power Cobbe (1822-1904) for The Age of Science: A Newspaper of the Twentieth Century (1877), a Satire purporting to replicate the New Year's Day issue of a 1977 newspaper (hence Nostradamus in her nom de guerre), which reveals the world of a century hence to have become a Dystopia. Medicine, though much advanced ...
Kelly, Harold Ernest
(1900-1969) UK author and publisher, founder with his brother, Hector Kelly, of Everybody's Books in 1943, then in 1946 of Robin Hood Press, for which he wrote many crime novels – being best known for those as by Darcy Glinto – and Westerns, along with some sf and horror. In the 1960s, he wrote crime under the House Name Hank Janson. As Eugene Ascher he wrote the Lucian Carolus ...
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 ...