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.
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 ...
SETI
Term coined outside the sf genre, standing for Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence – carried out by passive observation, typically using radio telescopes in hope of detecting Alien transmissions or Communications. A notable real-world effort was the 1960 observational Project Ozma founded by Frank Drake (1930-2022), sited at the US National Radio Astronomy Observatory (Green Bank, West Virginia) and discussed by Martin ...
Syvertsen, Ryder
(1941-2015) US author specializing in sf and fantasy adventure sequences, the only one to appear under his own name being the Mystic Rebel series beginning with Mystic Rebel (1988) and ending with Cave of the Master (1990). Also under his own name he wrote Psychic Spawn (1987) with Adrian Fletcher (pseudonym of Rosemary Ellen Guiley); and with Jan Stacy he wrote The Great Book of Movie Monsters (1983). ...
Stereo (Tile 3B of a CAEE Educational Mosaic)
Film (1969). Produced, directed and written by David Cronenberg as Emergent Films Ltd. Cast includes Iain Ewing, Clara Mayer, Glenn McCauley, Jack Messinger, Arlene Mlodzik, Ronald Mlodzik and Paul Mulholland. 65 minutes. Black and white. / David Cronenberg's first feature-length film, the director's third following the 16mm shorts Transfer (1966) and ...
Online Worlds
Any game involving more than one person is played in a kind of Shared World, even if that world only exists until one of the participants has won. Such places gained a greater degree of permanence in Role Playing Games, where the Gamemaster might create an episodic campaign taking years to complete, and in the Play by Mail industry, in which the moderator ...
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. ...