SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Wednesday 6 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.
Site updated on 4 December 2023
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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 ...
One Punch Man
Japanese animated tv series (2015); original title Wanpanman. Madhouse, J.C. Staff. Based on the Japanese web-Comic and Manga by ONE. Directors include Shingo Natsume and Chikara Sakurai. Writers: ONE and Tomohiro Suzuki. Voice cast includes Makoto Furukawa and Kaito Ishikawa. 24 24-minute episodes, plus six "original video animation" pieces on DVD/Blue Ray releases. ...
Barnes, James
(1866-1936) US author, mostly on nautical themes for Young Adult readers, whose sf novel, The Unpardonable War (1904), is an Edisonade in which – after war between Britain and America has been incited because America wishes to free Ireland and to annex Canada – the scientific genius Westland, "the Wizard of Staten Island", invents a device which explodes the enemy's gunpowder. America then takes the lead in ...
Spirit
US psychedelic rock band with an interest in science-fictional tropes. Spirit's eclectically inventive melange of style and subject is little listened-to now, although their fourth album Twelve Dreams of Doctor Sardonicus (1970) captures the late hippy blend of Mother Nature and the extraterrestrial cosmos in an interesting way, and Future Games (1977) bends the California experience around the lines of force of television science fiction, including ...
Ward, Herbert D
(1861-1932) US author, most of whose short stories of sf interest were political dramas whose venues were only marginally displaced from late-nineteenth-century America, even though some of the tales assembled in A Republic Without a President, and Other Stories (coll dated 1891 but 1893) were ostensibly set a century hence. The White Crown, and Other Stories (coll 1894) continued in the same vein, though the title story itself is a ...
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. ...