SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Sunday 10 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 ...
Michelmore, Reg
(? -? ). US author of whom nothing is known beyond An Adventure in Venus (1929 chap) illustrated by Frank R Paul, a clumsy Space Opera tale published by Hugo Gernsback in his Science Fiction Series. [JC]
de Parville, Henri
Pseudonym of French author François Henri Peudefer (1838-1909) who is of sf interest for Un habitant de la planète Mars: roman d'anticipation (1865; trans Brian Stableford as An Inhabitant of the Planet Mars 2008), based on a hoax newspaper article by Peudefer (signed A Lomon). published 17 May 1865 Le Pays, and purporting to describe the discovery of a humanoid fossil from Mars in ...
Dinosaurs
Our cultural fascination with the great lizards of prehuman Earth has inevitably led to much sf in which – as never in history – humans encounter living dinosaurs. This may take place in Prehistoric SF set in an anachronistic deep past, as in In the Morning of Time (coll of linked stories 1919) by Charles G D Roberts. A modern enclave of surviving dinosaurs is somewhat less risible. This ...
Reeth, Allan
Pseudonym of UK author G H Davis (? -? ); as there is no further information on Davis, this name may also be pseudonymous, and Davis may well be female. The only novel Davis published as by Reeth is a feminist Utopia, Legions of the Dawn (1908), in which British and American women establish a matriarchal society in Africa (see Feminism; Women in SF). Women ...
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 ...