SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 28 November 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 ...
Hayes, Charles Douglas
(1943- ) US author of Portals in a Northern Sky (2002), a Time Viewer tale set in Alaska, through which the protagonists watch the past: out of which comes danger. [JC]
New York
Great Cities may seem immemorial, but normally boast at least one named founder. Romulus and Remus founded Rome, or so the story tells us. Frankus, who was of Trojan birth, founded Paris, it is said. The Yellow Emperor, who revered the earth beneath his feet, founded Beijing 5,000 years ago. London was traditionally founded, or its founding was attended, by the giants Gog and Magog, first instanced as the single giant Gogmagog or Goemagot ...
Chrostowska, S D
(? - ) US-born teacher, journalist and author, in Canada from around 1995; her first novel, Permissions (2013), is nonfantastic. A critical anthology, The Uses of Utopia: New Marxist, Anarchist, and Radical Democratic Perspectives (anth 2017) with James D Ingram, reflects her central preoccupation as an academic with twentieth-century European Utopian thought. She is of sf interest for her second ...
Crack in the World
Film (1965). Security Pictures/Paramount. Directed by Andrew Marton. Written by Jon Manchip White, Julian Halevy. Cast includes Dana Andrews, Alexander Knox, Kieron Moore and Janette Scott. 96 minutes. Colour. / An attempt to use a nuclear device to tap geothermal energy from deep within the Earth causes a large and ever increasing crack in the crust. A bid to halt the process with a further nuclear explosion sends into space a large chunk of the ...
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. ...