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Sunday 10 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 ...
First Man Into Space
Film (1958), also known by its original screenplay title Satellite of Blood. Amalgamated/MGM. Directed by Robert Day. Written by John C Cooper, Lance Z Hargreaves, based on the original screenplay "Satellite of Blood" by Wyott Ordung. Cast includes Robert Ayres, Bill Edwards, Marla Landi and Marshall Thompson. 77 minutes. Black and white. / This is the second of two sf films made by Amalgamated in the UK that pretend to be set in the USA (the other was ...
Widescreen Baroque
An occasionally quoted critical term coined by Brian Aldiss to denote Space Opera at its most grandiose: what might also be termed space grand opera. In his introduction to the 1964 Faber edition (as The Paradox Men) of Charles L Harness's Flight into Yesterday (May 1949 Startling; exp 1953; vt The Paradox Men ...
Odell, Samuel W
(1864-1948) US lawyer and author of two sf books, Atlanteans; Adam Lore's Choice: Stories for Young Men (coll 1889) and The Last War; Or, The Triumph of the English Tongue [for full title see Checklist] (1898). In the latter, a Future-War story set in the twenty-sixth century, the highly civilized all-White Allied Anglo-American Nations decide, more in sorrow, to engage in "war to the end" against a miscegenate evil empire controlled ...
White, Stewart Edward
(1873-1946) US author of travel books and novels, many of the latter being historical tales set in California. In his later years he became interested in Spiritualism, believed he was in contact with his dead wife, and wrote some books about the other world, including The Unobstructed Universe (1940) and two sequels. Of sf interest is the Percy Darrow sequence. The Mystery (1907) with Samuel Hopkins Adams is a ...
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. ...