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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 ...
Electra Woman and Dyna Girl
US juvenile tv series (1976). Created by Ken Spears, and Joe Ruby. Produced by Sid and Marty Krofft Television Productions for ABC-TV. Cast includes Norman Alden, Deidre Hall and Judy Strangis. Directors included Walter C Miller, Jack Regas. Writers included Duane Poole, Dick Robbins. Eight 24-minute episodes. Colour. / Lori (Hall) and Judy (Strangis) – no last name is given for either – are magazine writers living in a modest ranch home in an unspecified US state, ...
Kelley, William Melvin
(1937-2017) US author whose celebrated short novel A Different Drummer (1959) is an sf fable telling of Black history in an imaginary town in an imagined southern state of the USA (see Race in SF), and ending with a mass emigration of all Blacks from this state in 1957. The isolation of this town [for Polder see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below] is reminiscent of the ...
Atwood, Margaret
(1939- ) Canadian poet and author, some of whose poetry – like Speeches for Doctor Frankenstein (1966 chap) – hints at sf content, but whose interest in the form as a prose writer only became evident (as did her dis-ease at being identified as a writer of sf) with the publication of The Handmaid's Tale (1985), which won the Governor General's Award in Canada and the first ...
Adam, Ruth
(1907-1977) UK author and broadcaster, in whose pacifist War on Saturday Week (1937) totalitarian "emergency" measures are imposed upon a Near Future Great Britain as war looms. [JC]
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. ...