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Tuesday 28 November 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 ...
Sala, George Augustus
(1828-1895) UK journalist and author, active from the early 1850s, best known as a highly flamboyant foreign correspondent. Of moderate sf interest are two tales: The Seven Sons of Mammon (1862 3vols), a crime novel featuring a totally undetectable poison; and Margaret Forster (1897), in which, disguised as a police detective, the devil persuades an old woman into doomed Rejuvenation as a rich young seductress. [JC]
Vallejo, Boris
(1941- ) American artist, born in Peru, who usually signs his work "Boris"; he is the father of artist Dorian Vallejo, husband of artist Julie Bell, and stepfather of artists David Palumbo and Anthony Palumbo. After briefly pursuing a career in medicine, which may have influenced his later renderings of human anatomy, Vallejo was trained in graphic design before moving to ...
Schuette, H George
(1850-1935) US author of Athonia; Or, the Original Four Hundred (1910; possible rev 1911), in which a series of pre-Columbian Utopias are described within a Club Story format, each of them being deemed a failure, though one Lost Race seems promising. The Grand Mysterious Secret Marriage Temple (1931) promulgates a society based on Eugenics. ...
Vernon, John
(1943- ) US academic and author, some of whose novels have been nonfantastic Westerns, including Lucky Billy (2008), a mythopoeically-told rendering of the Billy the Kid "saga". "Gulliver Goes South" (August 1992 Harper's) is a Gulliver tale. The narrator of Lindbergh's Son (1987) is a Brain in a Box who may, ...
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. ...