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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 ...
Golden Age of SF
It has been said, cynically, that the Golden Age of sf is twelve. (This epigram, often wrongly ascribed or paraphrased with slightly different ages, was coined by the sf fan Peter Graham.) / Certainly there is no objective measure by which we can say that the sf of any one period was notably superior to that of any other. Nonetheless, in conventional usage (at least within Fandom) some older readers have referred to the years 1938-1946 as sf's first Golden Age, ...
Murphy, Andrew C
(? - ) US author of Steel Sky (2003), a Post-Holocaust Dystopia set Underground in an imprisoning Keep, where the surviving population undergoes enforced estrangements. It feels like the End of the World. [JC]
Williamson, Robert H
(? -? ) UK author whose only known novel, The Sweetness of Revenge (1904) is an adventure with sf elements, including the Invention of an advanced Machine; any Near Future implications of the tale, which takes place mostly at sea, are only dubiously to be inferred. [JC]
Daley, Brian C
(1947-1996) US author who concentrated for the most part on multi-volume sequences, beginning with the Science-Fantasy Coramonde series – The Doomfarers of Coramonde (1977) and The Starfollowers of Coramonde (1979) – which puts into an Alternate-History setting a tale of Magic, court politics and quest, starring a Vietnam veteran who helps his ...
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 ...