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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 ...
Mitchell-Hedges, F A
(1882-1959) UK adventurer and author whose Lost Race novel, The White Tiger (1931), features the discovery of a living Aztec civilization in Mexico. Much of Mitchell-Hedges's nonfiction is colourful, including the narrative of his discovery of a "Crystal Skull", or "Skull of Doom" in Mayan ruins, 17,000 years old, very potent. Steven Spielberg's ...
Roshwald, Mordecai
(1921-2015) Polish-born academic and author, in Palestine/Israel 1934-1955, afterwards in the US. He is best known for his first sf novel, Level 7 (1959; text restored 2004), which is deeply coloured by political concern about our nuclear civilization. A military officer describes his feelings and duties from within a great Underground bomb shelter, 4000 feet below the world gradually being demolished above him as ...
Daybreakers
Film (2010). Lionsgate and Film Finance Corporation Australia present a Lionsgate/Paradise production in association with the Pacific Film and Television Commission and Furst films. Written and directed by Michael and Peter Spierig. Cast includes Willem Dafoe, Ethan Hawke, Claudia Karvan and Sam Neill. 98 minutes. Colour. / Above-average sf Vampire film set in a Near Future where a viral ...
Garis, Howard R
(1873-1962) US author active from about 1896, known mainly for such work outside the sf field as his Uncle Wiggily series, which began in 1910 in the Newark Evening News, and ran to nearly 15,000 widely syndicated episodes, some of which were gathered into the seventy-nine published volumes in the series; the newspaper column, in various late incarnations, only stopped in the year of his death. Much of the work he wrote for Edward ...
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 ...