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
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 ...
Prix du Danger, Le
French/Yugoslav Film (1983; vt The Prize of Peril). Swanie/TFI/UGC-Top 1/Avala. Directed by Yves Boisset. Written by Boisset, Jan Curtelin, based on "The Prize of Peril" (May 1958 F&SF) by Robert Sheckley. Cast includes Gérard Lanvin, Michel Piccoli and Marie-France Pisier. 98 minutes, cut to 88 minutes in English-dubbed version. Colour. / In this ...
Young, Jim
Working name of US officer in the American diplomatic service, actor and author James Maxwell Young (1951-2012), whose first novel, The Face of the Deep (1979), is set in a medieval environment located – it soon becomes clear – on the planet Bok II, which is threatened by an exploding Sun, but the natives cannot grasp the Cosmology implications of this coming event. The style is gritty, the action compressed; and ...
Junk Head
Japanese stop-motion animated film (2017; rev 2021). Yamiken. Directed and written by Takahide Hori. Voice cast includes Takahide Hori and Atsuko Miyake. 100 minutes. Colour. / Initially released as the short film Junk Head 1 (2013), which became the first 30 minutes of the 2017 full-length film discussed here (a revised version of which was released in 2021). Junk Head 1 took four years to produce and was made entirely by the ...
Chamberlain, William
(1903-1966) US soldier, in the US army 1927-1946, retiring with the rank of Brigadier General. He was the author of two borderline sf novels set in the very Near Future, Red January (1964) and China Strike (1967), both featuring US pre-emptive strikes against the enemy – in the first case Cuba, about to blackmail the USA; and in the second China, on the verge of dropping a cobalt bomb on her. In each case, the enemies of ...
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 ...