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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 ...
Nagaoka Shūsei
Working name of Shūzō Nagaoka (1936-2015), a Japanese artist who specialized in graphic design and album cover Illustration. Nagaoka was born in Nagasaki but raised on the remote island of Iki in south-west Japan; his first published work appeared in the magazine Chūgakusei no Tomo ["Middle Schooler's Friend"] in 1955, before he had finished high school. He dropped out of Musashino Art University in 1958 to pursue ...
McKenna, Richard M
(1913-1964) US author who spent most of his adult career (from 1931 to 1953), not very happily, in the US Navy. After returning to civilian life, he took a BA in literature at the University of North Carolina. His stories intertwined Hard SF themes such as Space Flight and Time Travel with soft sciences, notably Psychology and cultural ...
Kelvin Throop
Character in an occasional Analog feature billed as a short story but in fact a sequence of more or less Satirical epistolary grumbles in which the competent man Kelvin Throop – in various roles as Scientist, engineer, administrator, etc. – conveys his uninhibited opinions of bureaucrats, incompetents, the general public and other hindrances to the operation of whatever his department may currently ...
Gardner, James Alan
(1955- ) Canadian author who began publishing work of genre interest with "The Phantom of the Operator" for The University of Waterloo Courier in 1984, and who has spent much of his subsequent career expanding the League of Peoples/Festina Ramos sequence, which begins with his first novel, Expendable (1997), and continues with Vigilant (1999), Hunted (2000), Ascending (2001), Trapped ...
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. ...