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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 ...
Zumas, Leni
(1972- ) US academic and author whose first book, Farewell Navigator: Stories (coll 2008), contains relatively few outright examples of Fantastika but (see Postmodernism and SF) often admixes an almost suburban mundanity with prescient flashes of the exorbitance of the world. Her first novel The Listeners (2012) slightly less successfully conflates elements of ...
Foster, David
(1944- ) Australian author, much of whose work hovers close to the fantastic (see Equipoise), like Moonlite (1981), through whose floridly picaresque structure an exorbitant vision of the history of Australian immigration can be discerned, or The Adventures of Christian Rosy Cross (1986), a tale reminiscent of the work of Thomas Pynchon whose protagonist (1378-1483) is (or is ...
Slavnikova, Ol'ga
(1957- ) Russian author whose Near Future Satire, 2017 (2006; trans Marian Schwartz 2010), set one century after the Russian Revolution, depicts in exorbitant terms the costs of rampant "freedom", including naked capitalism at its most exploitative, Disasters looming from unchecked Climate Change, ...
Preuss, Paul
(1942- ) US author who worked in film production for a decade before beginning to write popular-science articles. He began to publish sf with The Gates of Heaven (1980) which, with Re-Entry (1981), comprises a very loose sequence, its main linkage being the assumption that Black Holes may be used to travel through both space and time. The second volume in particular demonstrates considerable virtuosity in its ...
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 ...