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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.
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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 ...
Mainstream Writers of SF
This discussion should be read in conjunction with several others as part of a pattern of reasoning that is most clearly presented in Definitions of SF, Fabulation, Genre SF, History of SF, Magic Realism, Postmodernism and SF, Proto SF and ...
Saxton, Josephine
(1935- ) UK author who began publishing sf with "The Wall" in Science Fantasy #78 for November 1965, and whose first three novels – The Hieros Gamos of Sam and An Smith (1969), Vector for Seven: The Weltanschaung of Mrs Amelia Mortimer and Friends [sic] (1970) and Group Feast (1971) – established her very rapidly as an inventive creator of sf ...
Iron Maiden
English heavy metal band formed in 1975 by bassist Stephen Harris (1956- ) and characterized by very loud, fast guitar work and the banshee vocals of lead singer Bruce Dickinson (1958- ). The band select promiscuously from established texts as premises for their songs, adapting many novels and (especially) films from war-story, mystery, historical, noir and sf genres. The latter, often inflected via a persistent interest in Satanism and occult ...
Queneau, Raymond
(1903-1976) French author, active from about 1920 and a founder member of the Oulipo movement, whose parodic (sometimes harum-scarum) poems and novels occasionally reconstruct mimetic forms into examples of Fantastika, light-heartedly. Pierrot mon Amour (1942; trans J Maclaren-Ross as Pierrot 1950) is particularly fantasticated. Of some interest is Saint Glinglin (1948; trans James ...
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. ...