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 ...
de Chair, Somerset
(1911-1995) UK Conservative politician, first elected to Parliament in 1934; his career ended in 1950 after a succession of (heterosexual) scandals. At the start of his long writing career, he published two tracts, The Impending Storm (1930), which predicted World War Two, and Divided Europe (1931), which predicted a Communist takeover of Eastern Europe; Peter Public: A Play in Three Acts (1932) as by the Hon Member ...
Dickson, Gordon R
(1923-2001) Canadian-born author, resident in the USA since age 13, becoming a US citizen many decades before his death. He was educated (along with Poul Anderson) at the University of Minnesota, taking his BA in English in 1948, and remained in Minnesota. After World War Two he re-established the Minneapolis Fantasy Society, with Anderson a central participant (Clifford D Simak was also involved at some point in the ...
She
The charismatic, goddess-like female ruler – usually referred to as "She" or "She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed" – in the Ayesha sequence by H Rider Haggard, opening with She: A History of Adventure (October 1886-January 1887 The Graphic; cut 1886; full text 1887). Ayesha clearly combines aspects of Aphrodite and Isis, being imperious, ravishing and potentially Immortal; but vulgarized echoes ...
Wallace, Bryan Edgar
(1904-1971) UK screenwriter and author, son of Edgar Wallace; he adapted some of his father's books for the cinema. His sf novel, The Device (1962), a Near Future tale of attempted world conquest, features an Antihero very similar to Norbert Jacques's Dr Mabuse, and was adapted and filmed as ...
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 ...