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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.
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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 ...
Gove, Philip Babcock
(1902-1972) US academic, noted in later life for his editorship of the Webster's Third New International Dictionary (1961), which was heavily attacked for its "permissive" retreat from the prescriptive authority of its predecessors; less controversially, he is of sf interest for The Imaginary Voyage in Prose Fiction: A History of its Criticism and a Guide for its Study, with an Annotated Check List of 215 Imaginary Voyages from 1700 to 1800 (1941). Though in no sense ...
Radiohead
UK rock group from the Oxford area. Their early work is recognizable, if high quality, "indie" rock, haunted by and expressive of contemporary anomie and angst. But the band's third album OK Computer (1997) exaggerated this individual sense of despair into a coherent and powerful Dystopian vision. Douglas Adams' The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy was ...
Mighels, Ella Sterling
(1853-1934) US author, almost all of whose work, fiction and nonfiction, deals with her native California; she was married to Philip Verrill Mighels. Her short Lost Race novel, Fairy Tale of the White Man: Told from the Gates of Sunset (1915 chap), sites the origin of the White Man in her home state, and describes a complex ancient urban civilization in glowing terms. [JC]
Magnason, Andri Snær
(1973- ) Icelandic playwright, poet and author of a children's fantasy, Sagan af bláa hnettinum ["The Story of the Blue Planet"] (1999), and of Lovestar (2002; trans Victoria Cribb as LoveStar 2012), a surreal sf tale set in an exaggerated Near Future world where every possible Information-Technology-based application is hugely more powerful than now, every ...
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. ...