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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 ...
Moseley, Maboth
(1906-1975) UK author of the Near Future War Upon Women: A Topical Drama (1934), in which a highly modern War is seen in terms of its savage effect on women (see Feminism). Moseley is also the author of Irascible Genius: A Life of Charles Babbage, Inventor (1964) (see Charles Babbage). [JC]
Pauvert, Olivier
(?1973- ) French pharmacist and author whose Near Future Dystopia, Noir (2005; trans Adriana Hunter 2008) depicts a France in which apartheid has been imposed, relegating nonwhites to segregated rural areas; the present-day protagonist arrives in this land by Timeslip as a kind of increasingly material ghost who seems to have suffered a ...
Banks, Tony
(1950- ) UK musician, best known as the keyboard-player and founder-member of Genesis, Banks released a number of solo albums, none of which enjoyed commercial success. The first of these, A Curious Feeling (1979), is a concept-album adaptation of Daniel Keyes's Flowers for Algernon (April 1959 F&SF; exp 1966), very Genesis-like in sound, with vocals by ...
Greengrass, Jessie
(1982- ) UK author some of whose shorter fiction, most of which has been assembled as An Account of the Decline of the Great Auk, According to One Who Saw It (coll 2015), is sf or fantasy, including "Winter, 2058", about a kind of Alien Invasion conducted via nodes where time is dislocated (see Time Distortion). The disquisitional elements in her first novel ...
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 ...