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Wednesday 6 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 ...
Maskill, Alexander
(? - ) UK author whose first novel, The Hive Construct (2014), which won the Terry Pratchett First Novel Award in 2013, is set in a bleak, moderately distant Near Future, Ruined Earth version of an Egypt devastated by Climate Change, in an Underground City called New Cairo. A not ...
MacKinlay, Sterling
(1876-1952) UK author whose Near Future sf novel, Reparation (1928), is a contribution to the prolonged debate about the treatment of defeated Germany after World War One; reparations begin in 1993. [JC]
Stranger Within, The
Made-for-tv film (1974). Lorimar/ABC TV. Directed by Lee Philips. Teleplay Richard Matheson, based on his "Mother by Protest" (September/October 1953 Fantastic; vt "Trespass" in The Shores of Space, coll 1957). Cast includes David Doyle, Barbara Eden, George Grizzard and Joyce Van Patten. 72 minutes. Colour. / A woman (Eden) becomes pregnant – inexplicably, as her husband (Grizzard) is certified to ...
Fontenay, Charles L
(1917-2007) US newspaperman and author, born in Brazil and raised in Tennessee from infancy, where he worked as a newspaperman for about half a century. He was a member of the If stable from the publication of his first story, "Disqualified", in September 1954, which he began much later to assemble in the incomplete Here, There and Elsewhen sequence of collected stories; he also wrote three somewhat routine sf novels over the next decade: Twice Upon a Time ...
Clute, John
(1940- ) Canadian critic, editor and author, in the UK from 1969; married to Judith Clute from 1964, partner of Elizabeth Hand since 1996. His first professional publication was the long sf-tinged poem "Carcajou Lament" (Winter 1960 [ie Autumn 1959] Triquarterly), though he only began consistently publishing sf reviews in his "New Fiction" column for the Toronto Star (1966-1967), and sf ...