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Thursday 7 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 ...
Strange Adventures [comic]
US Comic (first run 1950-1973). DC Comics. Issues #1-2 bimonthly; issues #3-211 monthly; issues #212-244 bimonthly. Editor Julius Schwartz. Writers included Otto Binder, John Broome, Gardner F Fox, Sid Gerson, and Edmond Hamilton. Artists included Neal Adams, Murphy ...
Smith, William Augustus
(? -? ) US author of His Pseudoic Majesty; Or, the Knights of the Fleece (1903), a Near Future novel whose sf underpinnings – in the main an idealized description of a hierarchical America free of the depredations of capitalism – are obscured by the allegorical recounting of the tale. [JC]
Cauty, Jimmy
(1956- ) UK singer-songwriter, artist and author, co-founder with Bill Drummond in 1987 of an electronic rock band, The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu (or the JAMs), taking much of its amply expressed "philosophy" from The Illuminatus Trilogy by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson, a spoof sf extravaganza with Secret Masters ...
Hamilton, Cicely
Pseudonym under which UK playwright, actor, Feminist and author Mary Cicely Hammill (1872-1952) published all her adult work, though her children's fiction, including some stories for the Sexton Blake series, was written as by Scott Rae and by Max Hamilton. Her best-known plays are eloquently suffragist; they include How the Vote Was Won (1908 chap; first performed 1909) with Christopher St John (1871-1960) (who had decades previously abandoned ...
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 ...