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 ...
Barry, Richard
(1881-1958) screenwriter, theatrical producer and author, active from around 1905; his Fruit of the Desert (September 1919 Short Stories as "The Secret of the Desert"; exp 1920) is a Lost Race Western set in desert California and featuring survivors of the Aztec Empire. Several long tales of potential interest appeared only in magazines; they include "Sea Lure" (20-27 February 1926 ...
Marlow, John Robert
(? - ) US author of Nano (2004), a Technothriller set in a Near Future where a Nanotechnology breakthrough is opposed by the American government, which leashes its own "nannites" against its presumed enemies; unfortunately, these nano-Weapons have not been programmed to stop; the world is, therefore, threatened. ...
Malki !, David
Working name of US author, cartoonist, book and game designer, and former film trailer editor David Malki (? - ), who describes the unexplained exclamation mark following his surname as an "honorific" analogous to Jr or PhD. He is best known for the popular web-Comic Wondermark, published since May 2003, which featured in the early online magazine Flak and in the print edition of the ...
Space Wars
Letter-size saddle-stapled Cinema magazine printed mostly on cheap newsprint. Published by Myron Fass as Stories, Layouts & Press. Editor: Garland Voss, possibly others. Twelve issues, October 1977 to April 1980. Publication schedule was roughly quarterly. / Publisher Fass was never slow to exploit a popular trend: with the success of Starlog, he added several sf film magazines to his publishing ...
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 ...