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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 ...
Jarre, Jean Michel
(1948- ) French composer and performer of electronic synthesizer pieces. There is no explicit sf content to the instrumental suites Oxygene (1976), Equinoxe (1978) and Les Chants Magnétiques (1981) but it is hard to escape the sense that these bleepy, throbbing, soaring soundscapes are aural SF. Jarre is certainly fascinated by space. The last track of Rendez-Vous (1986), "La Derniere Rendez-Vous" is dedicated ...
Zito, V M
(? - ) US advertising agency executive and author of The Return Man (2012), a Near Future Post-Holocaust novel set in the Evacuated States of western America four years after the now traditional Zombie holocaust has split America apart: gonzo zombies out West, which has become a no-man's-land, while the Safe States back East have been crushed into ...
Tales of Frankenstein
Made-for-tv film (1958). Hammer Film Productions/Columbia Pictures Corporation for Columbia Pictures Television. Directed by Curt Siodmak. Produced by Michael Carreras. Screenplay by Henry Kuttner, C L Moore (credited as Catherine Kuttner) and Jerome Bixby (uncredited) from a story treatment by Siodmak based on Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus ...
Great Year
The Great Year or Long Year, whose seasons last for many normal Earthly years, generations or even lifetimes, features in a number of sf works as a kind of literalization of cyclic history theories (see History in SF) in the context of Planetary Romance. The Dark Ages are reified as an interminable-seeming winter and the Golden Years as an equally prolonged summer. Special astronomical circumstances are generally invoked ...
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. ...