SF Encyclopedia Home Page
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 ...
Ray, Satyajit
(1921-1992) Indian film-maker and author, best known in the former capacity; beginning with Pather Panchali (1955), he made about thirty feature films, and is generally recognized as the finest Indian director to date. His fiction, much less well known outside India, was generally restricted to series of tales, including the Feluda sequence [not listed below] of detective stories featuring a Sherlock Holmes figure, accompanied by a ...
Malzberg, Barry N
(1939- ) US author. For about seven years he was extremely prolific in the sf field, very quickly producing some twenty sf novels and over 100 short stories, and much other work; his sf output slowed dramatically towards the end of the 1970s, when he became disenchanted with the genre for reasons explained in his collection of essays The Engines of the Night: Science Fiction in the Eighties (coll 1982; much exp vt ...
Winter, Ariel S
(? - ) US bookseller and author whose first novel, The Twenty-Year Death (2012) is a nonfantastic thriller told in three parts, each part in the voice of a famous crime writer (the first being Georges Simenon). A children's book, One of a Kind (2012 chap) is for younger children. He is of sf interest for his second adult novel, Barren Cove (2016), set in an ...
Sharp, Elliott
(1951- ). US avant-garde classical composer. A restlessly inventive artist, Sharp has released nearly a hundred albums (as solo projects or in collaboration with many other figures), a good number of which evidence interest in sf, broadly conceived; although without lyrical or deictic pointers, such an identification is arguable in some cases. Sharp is an aesthetically promiscuous musician who works with minimalism, atonal and noise-experimentation as well as elements of ...
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. ...