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Friday 8 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 ...
Bermuda Triangle
A loosely delineated region of the Caribbean (one definition locates the triangle's vertices in Bermuda, in Miami, Florida, and in San Juan, Puerto Rico), long associated in popular culture with supposedly weird and inexplicable happenings – especially maritime and airborne Disasters or disappearances. As a result the Bermuda Triangle has to some extent replaced the mythos of the Sargasso Sea as a natural locus for weird ...
Ammaniti, Niccolò
(1966- ) Italian author, most of whose work has no fantastic content. Anna (2015; trans Jonathan Hunt 2017) is set in a Near Future world devastated by a Pandemic which kills anyone who has reached sexual maturity (ie the age of fourteen), and any child who lives long enough to reach that point during the course of the tale. The young protagonist attempts to survive in the savage society of ...
Sambrot, William
(1920-2007) US author of more than 200 short stories, fifty of them sf, the latter beginning with "Report to the People" for The Blue Book Magazine in October 1953; his earliest publication was "The Saboteur" (Fall 1951 Suspense Magazine), a non-sf story about an encounter between a submarine and a mine. Most of his work appeared in the Saturday Evening Post and other ...
Half Human
Film (1955; vt Half Human: The Story of the Abominable Snowman). Original Japanese title Jūjin yuki otoko ["Monster Snowman"]. Toho Film Productions Ltd/Distributors Corporation of America (US). Produced by Tomoyuki Tanaka, Robert B Howard (US). Directed by Ishirō Honda, Kenneth G Crane (US). Written by Takeo Murata. Cast includes Morris Ankrum, John Carradine, Robert Karnes, Momako Kochi, Nobu Nakamura, Akemi Negiishi, Akira Takarada and Russell Thorson. ...
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 ...