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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 ...
Precognition
The usual term for the ESP talent, or Psi Power or Superpower, of seeing into the future. For genuine sf relevance this ability needs to be developed in somewhat more detail than the all too frequent narrative convenience of "some sixth sense warned him ..." Philip K Dick seems to have coined the term "precog" for a thus-gifted person, in "A World of Talent" (October 1954 ...
Lacroix, Paul
(1806-1884) French bibliographer and author who published under a variety of names, including P L Jacob and Bibliophile, and who was possibly an anonymous collaborator with Victor Hugo (1802-1885) and certainly did anonymous work for Alexandre Dumas. He is of sf interest for La Danse Macabre: histoire fantastique du XVème siecle (1832 as by P L Jacob, Bibliophile; trans Brian Stableford as ...
Metcalf, Norm
(1937-2019) US fan, collector and bibliographer whose The Index of Science Fiction Magazines 1951-1965 (1968) is a sequel to Index to the Science Fiction Magazines 1926-1950 (1952) by Donald B Day, and covers the same ground as the computerized index for the same years edited by Erwin S Strauss (though without the latter's issue-by-issue contents listing). It should be remembered that one or other ...
Penny, Laurie
(1986- ) UK author who began to publish work of genre interest with "Making Babies" in Terraform [online] for 13 April 2015; in her sf novel, Everything Belongs to the Future (2016), is set in a Near Future Britain, most of whose inhabitants have been comprehensively immiserated by the very rich, the 1% have access to an Immortality Drug, though the protagonist ...
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 ...