SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Sunday 10 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 ...
Saville, Malcolm
(1901-1982) UK editor and author, mostly for younger readers from 1943 until his death, most of his work being grouped into various series, the best known of these being the Lone Pine sequence, centring on a group of young friends who, in the first instalment, Mystery at Witchend (1943), thwart some German spies. Nothing of his work is of sf interest except for one tale in that series, Saucers Over the Moor: A Lone Pine Story (1955), in which the gang ...
Nickle, David
(1964- ) Canadian author who began publishing work of genre interest with "The Killing Way" (Spring 1992 On Spec); his Near Future first novel, The Claus Effect (fixup 1997) with Karl Schroeder, was published with a connected novelette, "The Toy Mill" (in Tesseracts4, anth 1992, ed Michael Skeet and Lorna Toolis); a ...
I Dream of Jeannie
American tv series (1965-1970). Screen Gems/Sidney Sheldon Productions for NBC. Executive producer Sidney Sheldon. Writers included Sidney Sheldon, James S Henerson, and Martin Roth. Directors included Hal Cooper, Claudio Guzmán, Gene Nelson, and E W Swackhamer. 5 seasons, 139 30-minute episodes. Colour. / Astronaut Tony Nelson (Larry Hagman), forced to land on a remote desert island after a Space Flight, finds a bottle that contains a ...
Ziegler, Rob
(? - ) US author whose Near Future sf novel, Seed (2011), depicts an America devastated by Ecological degradation and Climate Change, and under the sway of an AI – an entity evolved into a living Keep out of the ruins of Denver – which controls Agriculture ...
Nicholls, Peter
(1939-2018) Australian editor and author, primarily a critic and historian of sf through his creation and editing of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction [see below]; resident in the UK 1970-1988, in Australia from 1988; worked as an academic in English literature (1962-1968, 1971-1977), scripted television documentaries, was a Harkness Fellow in Film-making (1968-1970) in the USA, worked as a publisher's editor (1982-1983), often broadcast film and book reviews on BBC Radio from 1974 and ...