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 ...
Continuum: Roleplaying in the Yet
Role Playing Game (1999). Aetherco. Designed by Chris Adams, Barbara Manui, David Fooden. / Continuum is a game of Time Travel which contains one of the most thorough and rigorous explorations of the concept in the whole of sf. An extensive artificial vocabulary is employed to clarify the game's many disconcerting possibilities, from characters receiving advice from their future selves to duels fought by ...
Paradox
A logical contradiction or seeming contradiction. The most famous in sf are the many forms of Time Paradox and the so-called Fermi Paradox concerning our continuing lack of expected (according to certain arguments) First Contact with Aliens. Also frequently cited is the "twins paradox" of Relativity. / Logical paradoxes – like ...
Howell, George Rogers
(1833-1899) US educationist, editor and author of Noah's Log Book: How Two Americans Blasted the Ice on Mt Ararat and Found Noah's Ark and Some Curious Relics (coll 1898), the title tale describing the discovery of, and transcribing, Noah's journal. To this is appended "The Open Polar Sea: Its Discovery by an Unknown New Yorker, Believed to be From the East End of Long Island", whose narrator has travelled by Balloon to a clement ...
Johnson, Kenneth R [2]
(1942- ) UK journalist, author of books on occult and fringe science, and Horror author included here to distinguish him from the US bibliographer Kenneth R Johnson and the US television worker and novelist Kenneth Johnson. The UK Johnson also publishes as Ken Johnson and Kenneth Rayner Johnson (the Rayner being his mother's maiden name). His novels are ...
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 ...