SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Saturday 9 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 ...
American Flagg!
US Comic-book series (1983-1989, 63 issues), published by First Comics, created by writer/artist Howard V Chaykin. Generally considered one of the best sf Comics of the 1980s, American Flagg! is set in a media-saturated USA reduced to Third-World status, and stars Reuben Flagg, drafted into the Plexus Rangers in Chicago in the 2030s (Plexus being a Mars-based mega-cartel planning to sell ...
Hanley, James
(1901-1985) Irish author, in the UK from around 1908, whose prolific output – beginning with Drift (1930) – focused on raw tales of life at sea, and upon sometimes grim novels about working-class life in Britain, a savagery of address almost certainly effected in part through his long immersion in World War One; he enlisted early, was gassed and invalidated out of the army, and returned to war work as a stoker on ships carrying ...
Reese, Jenn
(1970- ) US author who began publishing work of genre interest with "Valkyrie" in Sword and Sorceress XVII (anth 2000) edited by Marion Zimmer Bradley; many of her best stories were assembled as Tales of the Chinese Zodiac (coll of linked stories 2006 ebook); Jade Tiger (2006) is a martial arts fantasy. Of sf interest is the Young Adult Above World ...
Toombs, Alfred
(1912-1986) US author in whose Good as Gold (1955), a Satire set in Near Future Washington, District of Columbia, the Transmutation of gold, reversing the traditional alchemical process, produces shit. [JC]
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 ...