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 ...
Bester, Alfred
(1913-1987) US editor and author, born in New York, a city with which he was always closely associated, his first two sf novels – on which his reputation increasingly depends – both being largely set in a vividly presented future New York. Educated in both humanities and sciences – including Psychology, perhaps the most important "science" in his sf – Bester entered sf when he submitted a story to ...
Pattison, Eliot
(1951- ) US author most of whose fiction consists of thrillers in the Inspector Shan sequence. Ashes of Earth: A Mystery of Post-Apocalyptic America (2011), is set in a Post-Holocaust America twenty-five years after the country has been devastated by international terrorism. An original founder of the village of Carthage – now a harsh pocket Dystopia in which knowledge of the ...
Badger, Joseph E, Jr
(1848-1909) US author who began contributing Dime Novels to journals like the New York Weekly and other Beadle & Adams publications from as early as 1870, mostly under his own name or as Harry Hazard; in his Young Adult Lost Race novel, The Lost City (1898), the young protagonist and his professor mentor are carried by Airship in a storm to the Olympic Mountains in the state of ...
Francis, Francis
Working name of George Frederick Wimbledon Francis (1865-? ), UK author of two novels with some genre interest: Eternal Enmity (1892 2vols), a complex supernatural thriller, and Mother of Gold (1931), a Lost Race tale set in Mexico, where a scientifically advanced civilization of Ulmecs is discovered. [JC]
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 ...