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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 ...
Compton Crook/Stephen Tall Memorial Award
Sf/fantasy/horror Award which honours the best first novel of the year, as voted by members of the US Baltimore area's annual Convention, Balticon. It is named for Compton Crook (1908-1981), who published sf as Stephen Tall. The award was first presented in 1983 for work first published in 1982. An additional prize of, currently, $1000 goes to the winner. [DRL] Winners 1983: Donald ...
Mead, Shepherd
Working name of US author Edward Mead (1914-1994), in either Switzerland or the UK after 1957; he worked in advertising before turning to writing, and was active in various genres. Satire and comedy combine in most of his works, most pointedly in his best-known work, the nonfantastic mock instructional manual, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying (1952), for the staged version of which he shared a Pulitzer Prize and a Tony. Satire also ...
Gilson, Charles
(1878-1943) UK soldier and author, who sometimes signed early books as Captain Charles Gilson and later publications as Major Charles Gilson, and whose tales for young male English readers are riddled with the class, racial and imperialist assumptions of his era. He is best known for fantasies like The Cat and the Curate: A Phenomenal Experience (1934), in which a Cat is transformed into a seductive Middle Eastern lady, and for ...
Henham, Ernest G
(1870-1948) UK author whose first novel of genre interest after the marginal God, Man, & the Devil (1897), mostly notable for a final dream so terrible it kills the dreamer, was Tenebrae (1898), which features the depredations of a monstrous spider, as experienced by a madman. Bonanza: A Story of the Outside (1901) is a tale of the Arctic Gold Rush in which prospectors stumble across a valley protected by a magnetic ...
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 ...