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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 ...
Lensman [series]
Influential Space Opera series created by E E Smith (whom see for full discussion). Other authors of stories set in the Lensman universe are William Ellern, Hideyuki Furuhashi and David Kyle, the last focusing on the three Alien allies of the main series hero Kim Kinnison who like him ...
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso
(1876-1944) Egyptian-born polemicist, editor and author, in France from early manhood and subsequently in Italy. As the author of "Fondazione e Manifesto del Futurismo" (5 February 1909 Gazzetta dell'Emilia; trans anon in Exhibition of Works by the Italian Futurist Painters, graph 1912, as "The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism"), he is credited with founding the Futurism movement; "Futurist Manifesto" argues for an epiphanic immolation in the ...
Turner, George
(1916-1997) Australian sf critic and author, whose connection with sf came quite late in life, long after the publication 1959-1967 of his first five novels, all of them mainstream; they were eventually followed by Transit of Cassidy (1978), also nonfantastic. He became well known for somewhat stern sf criticism in the 1970s, published in SF Commentary, Foundation and elsewhere, and ...
Quarber Merkur
Austrian Fanzine; edited by Franz Rottensteiner since its inception in 1963. In the argot of fans, Quarber Merkur is a "sercon" (serious and constructive) fanzine, one of the longest-running and most impressive of its type. It publishes critical, bibliographical, sociopolitical and historical studies of sf, Utopias, weird fiction and Fantasy. Averaging 90 large ...
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 ...