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Sunday 3 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 27 November 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 ...
Future Boy Conan
Japanese animated tv series (1978; vt Conan, The Boy in Future). Original title Mirai Shōnen Konan. Based on the novel The Incredible Tide (1970) by Alexander Key. Nippon Animation. Directed by Hayao Miyazaki. Written by Satoshi Kurumi, Akira Nakano and Sōji Yoshikawa. Voice cast includes Iemasa Kayumi, Ichirô Nagai, Mieko Nobusawa, Noriko Ohara, ...
MacInnes, Helen
(1907-1985) Scottish author, in US from 1937 (naturalized 1952); married to the popular broadcaster and academic Gilbert Highet (1906-1978) from 1932 until his death; active from the early 1930s. She was best known for spy novels like Above Suspicion (1941), though she also wrote some well-received romances. The one oddity in her bibliography is Home Is the Hunter: A Comedy in Two Acts (performed 1964; 1964), the only play she wrote in a career of some forty-five ...
Editorial Practices: Checklists
Checklists of published works are a new feature, added in this third edition of the encyclopedia, released online in October 2011. These include bookshop affiliate links, automatically added to italicized book titles by the website software and coloured as links in the ordinary way. All such links go to the encyclopedia's generic shopping page, allowing search of various online bookstores. During the period of our sponsorship by Hachette/Orion/Gollancz such links would connect to the Gollancz ...
World SF
1. An international association of sf professionals (not only authors, but also artists, critics, editors, agents, publishers, etc.), founded in Dublin, September 1976, by professionals at the First World Science Fiction Writers' Conference, and coming into operation as of the 1978 Dublin meeting. World SF's stated aim was "the general dissemination of creative sf, the furthering of scholarship, the interchange of ideas ... the fostering of closer bonds between those who already hold ...
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 ...