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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 ...
Shippey, Tom
Working name of Indian-born academic and editor Thomas A Shippey (1943- ), in the UK from childhood; Professor of English Language and Medieval Literature at the University of Leeds 1979-1993; held the Walter J Ong Chair of Humanities at St Louis University 1993-2008. In essays and reviews, which he has been publishing since the mid-1970s, he takes a clear-headed orthodox view of the central figures of sf and fantasy; ...
Davis, Ellis James
(1850-1905) UK barrister who, mainly in the 1870s, was briefly active as an author. Pyrna: A Commune; Or, Under the Ice (1875) is a Lost World tale, set under a Swiss glacier; the Underground civilization there discovered occupies a geometrical City, where equality between the Sexes is observed. In Front of the World (1876 3vols), even more ...
Nabokov, Vladimir
(1899-1977) Russian-born US poet, translator, entomologist and author. Raised in Russia until the Revolution, and then educated at Cambridge, he lived between the wars in Germany and France, writing as by V Sirin; he emigrated to the USA in 1940 – at which point he began to write in English rather than Russian (he had been an accomplished translator from English into Russian for some years) – and from 1959 lived in Switzerland. His first books of poetry date from the teens of the ...
Sawyer, Robert J
(1960- ) Canadian author, one of the two or three most prominent Canadian sf writers, married to sf poet Carolyn Clink; though he publishes widely, with most of his books being released by New York firms, his work is notable for its frequent use of Canadian settings; it is a mark of twenty-first century Genre SF that Canada and Canadian settings are now perceived as non-exotic, a change for which Sawyer can share ...
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 ...