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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 ...
Adam and Eve
Brian W Aldiss has given the name Shaggy God Stories to stories which provide simple-minded sf frameworks for Biblical myths. A considerable fraction of the unsolicited material submitted to sf magazines is or was reputed to consist of stories of this kind, the plot most frequently represented being the one in which survivors of a space disaster land on a virgin world and reveal (in the final line) that their names are ...
Starchaser: The Legend of Orin
US/South Korean animated film (1985). Young Sung Production Co. Ltd.. Directed by Steven Hahn. Written by Jeffrey Scott. Voice cast includes Carmen Argenziano, Tyke Caravelli, Joe Colligan, Anthony De Longis, Noelle North, Les Tremayne and Thomas H. Watkins. 101 minutes. Colour. / The slaves (see Slavery) who dig for crystals in planet Trinia's mines are told by the god Zygon (De Longis) that this is the only world and ...
Miller, Richard
(1925-2006) US author whose Snail (1984) is a satirical Time-Travel tale in which the Wandering Jew and a Prussian soldier traverse a late-twentieth-century USA, viewing with dismay the New Age trash – both psychic and physical – which chokes the land, and en route meeting Kilgore Trout (see Kurt Vonnegut Jr). The SQUED sequence comprising Squed ...
Reichs, Kathy
(1948- ) US forensic anthropologist and author, whose work includes academic papers and books, and crime novels in the Temperance Brennan sequence featuring a forensic anthropologist. A spin-off from that sequence for the Young Adult market – the Tory Brennan series starting with Virals (2010) – was co-written with her son, at first uncredited, and features Temperance's grand-niece who, with her young ...
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 ...