SF Encyclopedia Home Page
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.
Site updated on 27 November 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 ...
Byron, Lord
Working name and title of UK poet George Gordon Noel Byron (1788-1824), the central figure – along with Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats (1795-1821) – in the second generation of English Romantic poets; father of Ada Lovelace. At least as directly as did Shelley in Prometheus Unbound (1820), and perhaps more accessibly, he expressed throughout his career a volatile but persistent sense that ...
Icons
A number of historical, fictional and mythical characters have acquired iconic status in sf. Most such figures from myth and Religion have their proper home in Fantasy, but nevertheless appear repeatedly in sf and Science Fantasy – not only Shaggy God Stories but subtler rationalizations or reworkings of legend. In this category are ...
Biheguan Zhuren
["Master of the Jade Lotus Pavilion"] Pseudonym of Jin Zuoli (? -? ), a Chinese author whose first work of genre note Huangjin Shijie ["Golden World"] (1907 Xiaoshuo Lin) imagined Chinese coolies in America resisting a real-world 1894 racial exclusion law by founding a Utopian community. Inspired in part by the fiction of Liang Qichao, he subsequently wrote ...
Bridgeman, Amanda
(? - ) Australian author whose Aurora sequence beginning with Darwin (2013 ebook) is set in a moderately distant Near Future galaxy, into which Homo sapiens is edgily expanding. In the first volume, a human force (see Military SF) must explore a mysterious abandoned Space Station, a mission complicated by a passel of new ...
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 ...