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.
Site updated on 27 November 2023
Sponsor of the day: Andy Richards of Cold Tonnage Books
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 ...
Talentless Nana
Japanese animated tv series (2020). Original title Munō na Nana. Based on the Manga by Looseboy and Iori Furuya. Bridge. Directed by Shinji Ishihira. Written by Fumihiko Shimo. Voice cast includes Mai Nakahara, Yuichi Nakamura, Rumi Ookubo, Hiro Shimono, Yoshitaka Yamaya and Kouji Yusa. Thirteen 24-minute episodes. Colour. / Fifty years ago the appearance of the Enemies of Humanity – ...
Chesterton, G K
(1874-1936) UK author and illustrator of his own books and many by Hilaire Belloc – with whom he was long associated, closely enough that George Bernard Shaw referred to them as The Chesterbelloc. Two posthumous collections, The Coloured Lands (coll 1938) and Daylight and Nightmare: Uncollected Stories and Fables (coll 1986), which assemble short pieces including some sf stories from ...
Asprin, Robert Lynn
(1946-2008) US author who began publishing sf with his first novel, The Cold Cash War (1977), which alarmingly conflates Game-World antics (like fake Wars between mercenaries representing rival corporations on rented turf – Brazil, for instance, being visualized mainly as an arena for world-dominating firms to play games in) and a political rationale to legitimize the corporate control of Earth. Asprin's later novels ...
Mixon, Laura J
(1957- ) US author, married to Steven Gould, who began publishing sf with the first of the Omni Odysseys sequence for younger readers, Omni: Astropilots (1987; vt Astro Pilots 1987); other titles were from other hands. Her first adult novel, Glass Houses (December-mid-December 1991 Analog; 1992), is a Cyberpunk-influenced tale set in ...
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 ...