SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Saturday 9 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 ...
DeNiro, Anya Johanna
(1973- ) US author who began to publish work of genre interest as by Alan DeNiro with "If I Leap I Shall Fall into My Hands" in Altair magazine for August 2000, assembled with other early work in Skinny Dipping in the Lake of the Dead: Stories (coll 2006). She has also written Horror stories as part of the "Ratbastards" group which writes and edits the Rabid Transit anthologies. Her second ...
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]
Buchholz, Matthew
(? -? ) US artist and author, initially sf interest for Alternate Histories of the World (graph 2013), a fantasticated chronological sequence of images taken from various historical (or quasi-historical) events, each of them textually and visually estranged into Alternate History understandings of the events in question. Sometimes the estrangements read as sf, sometimes as fantasy, sometimes as delusion, ...
Battle of Dorking
Probably the most important and influential of early Future War stories, George T Chesney's anonymously published novella The Battle of Dorking: Reminiscences of a Volunteer (May 1871 Blackwood's Magazine; 1871 chap) conveyed a dire warning against British jingoist complacency with its depiction of a surprise Invasion by an unnamed country (ie Germany) whose secret ...
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 ...