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
Sponsor of the day: Andy Richards of Cold Tonnage Books
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 ...
Tokusatsu
Tokusatsu is a contraction of the Japanese term tokushu satsuei ["special photography"] and is the term for special effects used in live action film and Television. It is mainly associated with those sf, Fantasy and Horror productions that are dominated by special effects; thus there are many works in those genres not classifiable as Tokusatsu. / Strictly speaking, ...
Hayward, Dagney
Pseudonym of UK author John Dagney Major (1875-1937), under which name appeared The Secret of the Silent City!: A Magnificent Adventure Story (1920 The Magnet; 1921), an unpretentious Lost Race tale. An earlier sf tale, "Into the Unknown", was serialized in The Gem in 1916 under the byline Dagney Major. [JC/SH] see also: Boys' Friend Library; ...
Quincy, J P
(1829-1910) US lawyer, politician (mayor of Boston, Massachusetts, 1895-1899) and author. After, Lyteria: A Dramatic Poem (1854), a long philosophical verse drama set in Roman times with strong hints of the supernatural, he mostly published legal studies, though his one novel, The Peckster Professorship: An Episode in the History of Psychical Research (1888), is of sf interest as an attempt to put various occult preoccupations – divination, prophecy (see ...
Thompson, V M
(1948- ) US author of several sf novels combining Horror in SF manoeuvres with medical Biology, her work tending to focus on Monsters created through Genetic Engineering. She published two novels of this description under her own name, Deadly Nature (1988) and Project God (1989), the latter of which unconvincingly ...
Clute, John
(1940- ) Canadian critic, editor and author, in the UK from 1969; married to Judith Clute from 1964, partner of Elizabeth Hand since 1996. His first professional publication was the long sf-tinged poem "Carcajou Lament" (Winter 1960 [ie Autumn 1959] Triquarterly), though he only began consistently publishing sf reviews in his "New Fiction" column for the Toronto Star (1966-1967), and sf ...