SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Wednesday 6 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.
Site updated on 4 December 2023
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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 ...
Sellings, Arthur
Pseudonym of UK bookseller and author Arthur Gordon Ley (1921-1968), who began publishing sf stories with "The Haunting" for Authentic Science Fiction in October 1953; the best of his output of about thirty tales was assembled in Time Transfer (coll 1956; with five stories cut 1966) and The Long Eureka (coll 1968). In the 1960s his productivity increased; he died (suddenly, of a heart attack) just as he was ...
Adams, Neal
(1941-2022) Influential and remarkably prolific US Comic-strip artist specializing in the Superhero and Horror genres, with a strong, gutsy yet sophisticated (and often-copied) line style. His continued claim to fame probably rested largely on his ground-breaking personal reinterpretation of DC Comics's Batman, which kicked up what has been ...
Nodaway, Max
(? -? ) US author of a Lost Race tale, Rollo in Hawaii: A Tale of Thrilling Adventures, Amid Volcanoes, Fire Fountains and Tropical Wonderlands; Into which is Woven a Vivid Description of those Mystic Isles, Where Fire and Water have Built up a Delirium of Chaos and Beauty (1908). [JC]
Lieberman, Herbert
(1933- ) US editor, journalist and author of several novels, most of which engage in scenarios involving flight and literal or metaphorical incarceration, but only one of which, Sandman, Sleep (1993), is sf. In the moderately distant Near Future, on a congested but psychically remote Island, a Mad Scientist father-figure conducts experiments in ...
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. ...