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
Sponsor of the day: Andy Richards of Cold Tonnage Books
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 ...
Haibane Renmei
Japanese animated tv series (2002). Radix. Based on the Manga by Yoshitoshi Abe. Directed by Tomokazu Tokoro. Written by Yoshitoshi Abe. Voice cast includes Ryō Hirohashi, Junko Noda, Tamio Ōki and Akiko Yajima. 13 25-minute episodes. Colour. / A girl dreams of falling whilst a crow tries to prevent her descent. Meanwhile, cigarette-smoking Reki (Noda), wearing a halo and small pair of wings, discovers a giant cocoon in a ...
Smit, Sam
(? - ) UK author whose The Serendipity Foundation (2016) focuses on the twenty-first century plan of an aeons-old cabal of Secret Masters to blackmail the world into behaving sanely. The tone is forcedly comic, but intermittently relaxes into seriousness. [JC]
Cranford, Robin
(1923- ) South African author, later in the UK; My City Fears Tomorrow (1961), a non-fantastic tale set in Johannesburg, thematically precedes Leave Them Their Pride (1962), which is set in the same general venue in 1975, and deals with the Invasion of South Africa by freed Blacks, and the decision of those whites who survive to accept relegation to a small "homeland". [JC]
Montimore, Margarita
(? - ) US author whose first novel of psychic distress and disarray, Asleep from Day (2018), investigates the one-day Amnesia of its protagonist through scenes that bleed into the fantastic (see Fantastika), though without any explicit dissolving of borders. She is of sf interest for her second novel, Oona Out of Order (2020; vt ...
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 ...