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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 ...
Santa Claus Conquers the Martians
Film (1964; vt Santa Claus Defeats the Aliens). Jalor Productions. Directed by Nicholas Webster. Written by Glenville Mareth, based on a story by Paul L Jacobson. Cast includes Vincent Beck, John Call, Donna Conforti, Leonard Hicks, Bill McCutcheon and Victor Stiles. 81 minutes. Colour. / In an effort to cheer up the children of Mars, who have learned about Santa Claus by watching television programmes from Earth, the Martian Kimar (Hicks) resolves to ...
Martin, John
(1789-1854) UK painter and illustrator with a spectacularly melodramatic imagination, whose vast canvases depicting cataclysmic biblical scenes of Disaster and the End of the World have informed much modern fantasy Illustration. Even his delicate mezzotint illustrations for such editions as Paradise Lost (1824) by John Milton (1608-1674) have an epic quality; his variously published ...
Kaufman, Charlie
(1958- ) US screenwriter, filmmaker and author. An NYU film-school classmate of writer-director Chris Columbus, Kaufman struggled for a decade writing spec scripts for television and occasional pieces for National Lampoon, before eventually landing script work on a series of now little-remembered Television shows through the 1990s; the experience of protracted unsuccess remains an emotional centre of all of his major films. Of his ...
Stone, Charles John
(1837-1886) UK author of nonfiction works about the origins of religion, and of What Happened After the Battle of Dorking; Or, the Victory of Tunbridge Wells (1871 chap) anonymous, a response to the grim Battle of Dorking scenario as argued so alarmingly by George T Chesney. In this case the successful reversal of Britain's defeat is placed in Tunbridge Wells, Kent; the tale is told by a participant to his ...
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 ...