SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 28 November 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 ...
Clareson, Thomas D
(1926-1993) US editor, critic and professor of English. By the time he took his PhD at the University of Pennsylvania in 1956, he had published his first sf criticism, "The Evolution of Science Fiction" (August 1953 Science Fiction Quarterly). He was perhaps best known for editing Extrapolation continuously from its founding in December 1959 to Winter 1989, at which point he handed over the reins to his ...
Ammaniti, Niccolò
(1966- ) Italian author, most of whose work has no fantastic content. Anna (2015; trans Jonathan Hunt 2017) is set in a Near Future world devastated by a Pandemic which kills anyone who has reached sexual maturity (ie the age of fourteen), and any child who lives long enough to reach that point during the course of the tale. The young protagonist attempts to survive in the savage society of ...
Ōhara Mariko
(1959- ) Japanese author whose characterization of her own later work as Widescreen Baroque aptly summarizes its poetic whimsy and operatic breadth. However, she has been more influential as a writer on matters of Feminism and Transgender SF, particularly in several Cyberpunk-era speculations on gender ambiguity. ...
Shadow of Memories
Videogame (2001; vt Shadow of Destiny). Konami. Designed by Junko Kawano. Platforms: PS2 (2001); Win, XBox (2002); PSP (2009). / Shadow of Memories is a highly atmospheric graphical Adventure with an unusual plot; the player must solve the mystery of their own murder. The display is fully three-dimensional, and the gameplay revolves around puzzle solution and conversation with computer ...
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 ...