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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 ...
Tuckwell, William
(1829-1919) UK minister, teacher and author, well-known for his advocacy of "Christian socialism" and for broadening school curricula to include science. He was not an author of fiction, though his essay in Futures Studies, The New Utopia; Or, England in 1985: A Lecture (1885 chap), which was influenced by William Morris's arcadian philosophy, eloquently describes Utopia in terms ...
Genone, Hudor
Pseudonym of US soldier, businessman and author William James Roe (1843-1921) for his sf and fantasy; he also produced some non-fantastic work under his own name and under other pseudonyms, including G I Cervus and Viroe. He was a freethinker – a disposition of mind found with surprising infrequency among nineteenth-century sf writers – and in an sf Satire, Inquirendo Island (1886), he dramatized in unmistakable terms his negative feelings ...
Verso, Francesco
(1973- ) Italian editor, publisher and author, a whirlwind force behind World SF, in the service of which he established the Future Fiction publishing house. As both an sf writer and editor, Verso is deeply committed to extrapolatory explorations of Near-Future Earth. An early notable novel is Livido (2013; trans Sally McCorry as Nexhuman 2014), for which he ...
Beeching, Jack
Working name of UK poet and author John Charles Stuart Beeching (1922-2001), author (in collaboration with his first wife) of numerous Young Adult historical novels as James Barbary. His sf novel, The Dakota Project (1968), is a Near Future tale focusing on the eponymous, claustrophobic government project which prefigures outcomes ominous to a free society. [JC]
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. ...