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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 ...
Wood, William
(? - ) UK author whose sf novel The News from Karachi (1962) posits a Near Future world afflicted by a rolling succession of plagues, perhaps triggered by uncontrolled testing of nuclear weapons (see Nuclear Energy; World War Three). Mutant fauna have been to proliferate. The Prime Minister of a pan-European ...
Egan, Jennifer
(1962- ) US author whose early short fiction – most of it smilingly disjunctive (see Postmodernism and SF) and some of it of direct fantastic interest – was assembled in Emerald City: The Collected Works of Jennifer Egan (coll 1993; exp vt Emerald City 1996). The protagonist of her second novel, Look at Me (2001), a model with an artificial face, transacts a hallucinated ...
Gorst, Harold E
(1868-1950) UK journalist, editor and author, of whose ten or more works of fiction two are sf: Without Bloodshed: A Probability of the Twentieth Century (1897), a Satire set in a Near Future UK whose socialist government has been subverted by American millionaires for their own advantage; and Sketches of the Future (coll 1898), which contains several further satires, always from a politically and culturally ...
Graves, C L
(1856-1944) Irish-born editor and author, largely resident in England, Robert Graves's uncle; his anonymous sf spoof, The War of the Wenuses: Translated from the Artesian of H G Pozzuoli (1898) with E V Lucas, parodies H G Wells's The War of the Worlds (April-December 1897 Pearson's; 1898) not wisely but too well, transposing almost ...
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. ...