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Saturday 9 December 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 ...
Kersh, Gerald
(1911-1968) UK author, born in the county of Middlesex, despite stories that he was born in Russia; in the USA from the 1950s, becoming an American citizen; active from the mid-1930s. He was very prolific in shorter forms but is known mainly for such work outside the sf field as Night and the City (1938) and They Die with Their Boots Clean (1941). Many of his numerous short stories (some 400 were published, over 100 of them never collected in his lifetime) are sf or ...
Goldsmith, Cele
(1933-2002) US editor of SF Magazines who in 1956-1958 was assistant editor and then managing editor of Amazing Stories and Fantastic under Paul W Fairman, becoming editor of both in December 1958; she held this position until June 1965, when the magazines were sold and ceased for a time to publish original stories. Under her editorship the quality of both improved ...
Mattingly, David B
(1956- ) US sf artist who has occasionally worked also under the names David Mattingly, D B Mattingly and Dave Mattingly. He received his formal art training at the Colorado Institute of Art and Pasadena's Art Center College of Design, then began working full time at Walt Disney Studios (see The Walt Disney Company), eventually becoming the head of the matte department there; among the Disney movies of sf interest on which he ...
Anderson, Barth
(1964- ) US author who began to publish work of genre interest with "Landlocked" for Talebones in Winter 2000, and has written Horror stories as part of the "Ratbastards" group which writes and edits the Rabid Transit anthologies. The Patron Saint of Plagues (2006), a Near Future thriller set in a Near Future expansive Mexico ...
Clute, John
(1940- ) Canadian critic, editor and author, in the UK from 1969; married to Judith Clute from 1964, partner of Elizabeth Hand since 1996. His first professional publication was the long sf-tinged poem "Carcajou Lament" (Winter 1960 [ie Autumn 1959] Triquarterly), though he only began consistently publishing sf reviews in his "New Fiction" column for the Toronto Star (1966-1967), and sf ...