SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Friday 8 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 ...
Robotmen of the Lost Planet
US Comic (1952). One issue. Avon Periodicals, Inc (see Avon Comics). The comic is dominated by a three part serial, "Robotmen of the Lost Planet", scripted by Walter Gibson and drawn by Gene Fawcette. / In the future all the work is done by Robots, who resemble people save for their oversized elongated oval heads with oddly designed features. Cities have fallen into disrepair ...
James, P D
(1920-2014) civil servant and author whose detective novels, beginning with Cover Her Face (1962) and generally featuring Commander Adam Dalgliesh of Scotland Yard, comprise a literate, conservative, elegiac but tough-minded defence of traditional English civility, a vision darkened by the fact that the austere, deeply intelligent Dalgliesh is agnostic, and the England he defends is self-damaging. The hints of a high-tech sabotage of a coastal nuclear plant in ...
Moberg, Vilhelm
(1898-1973) Swedish playwright, nonfiction writer and author who published 18 novels, 38 stage or radio plays and 21 nonfiction books, four of them issued posthumously; he is most famous for his historical novels, perhaps primarily for his four-volume series The Emigrants (1949-1959; trans as The Emigrants, Unto a Good Land, The Settlers, and The Last Letter Home 1956-1959), following a group of Swedish ...
Wolf, Christa
(1929-2011) German author, most of whose creative life was spent in East Germany, where her career was difficult but ultimately – though perhaps not until her last decade – recognized in moat-defensive reunited Germany as triumphant. "Selbstversuch" ["Self-Experiment"] (February 1973 Sinn und Form), filmed for Television as Selbstversuch (1990) directed by Peter Bird, is a radical exercise in ...
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 ...