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Thursday 30 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 ...
Wheeler-Nicholson, Malcolm
(1890-1968) US magazine entrepreneur, prolific producer of pulp fiction important in the history of Comics as the founder of the firm which became DC Comics; and author. Death Over London (1940) is uninteresting sf featuring Nazi spies destroying American installations in London with sympathetic vibrations. [RB]
Maddern, Philippa
(1952-2014) Australian academic and author who wrote fiction as Pip Maddern, beginning with her best-known story, "The Ins and Outs of the Hadhya City-State" in The Altered I (anth 1976) edited by Lee Harding, a tale perhaps influenced by Jorge Luis Borges, featuring a profoundly intricate City from which it is impossible to escape. In another story of strong interest, "Inhabiting ...
Lichtenberger, André
(1870-1940) French editor, politician and author. Of his several works of fantasy or sf, Les Centaures, roman fantastique (Paris: Calman-Lévy, 1904) and Pickles, ou récits à la mode anglaise ["Pickles; Or, Stories in the English Style"] (coll 1923), have been assembled as The Centaurs and Other Stories (omni trans Brian Stableford 2013). The title novel is a prehistoric fantasy about the ...
Belot, Adolphe
(1829-1890) Guadeloupe-born French playwright and author of popular fiction, mostly melodramatic, and probably too "racy" to be publishable in English during his lifetime. He is known in translation only for the Miss Poles sequence comprising La Sultane parisienne (1877) and La Vénus Noire: Voyage Dans l'Afrique Central (1877; trans George D Cox as The Black Venus: A Tale of the Dark Continent 1881), both volumes having been translated ...
Robinson, Roger
(1943- ) UK computer programmer, bibliographer and publisher, active in UK Fandom for many years. The Writings of Henry Kenneth Bulmer (1983 chap; rev 1984 chap) is an exhaustive Bibliography of one of the most prolific sf writers, and Who's Hugh?: An SF Reader's Guide to Pseudonyms (1987) is similarly exhaustive in its listing of Pseudonyms. ...