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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 ...
Maugham, W Somerset
(1874-1965) French-born physician (he never practised), playwright and author, in UK from late childhood, Robin Maugham's uncle. He remains best known for Of Human Bondage (1915), a rather grim Bildungsroman, partially autobiographical, for The Moon and Sixpence (1919), a fictional portrait of Paul Gauguin (1848-1903), and for Cakes and Ale (1930), a roman à clef whose main target was Hugh Walpole ...
Eggleston, Katharine
(1874-? ) US author who according to early records was born Katie M Junkermann (forename also given as Katherine or Katharine, surname sometimes as Junkerman or Jenkerman); married to fringe-science writer Fenwicke L Holmes in 1919. Her Lost World novel is Red O'Rourke's Riches (2 March-20 April 1912 The Cavalier Weekly as by Katherine Eggleston and F H Richardson; 1937), in which an Egyptian colony is discovered in the ...
Taylor, Charles D
(1938- ) US author whose Bernie Ryng series of Technothrillers beginning with First Salvo (1985) offers a Cold War perspective on conflicts in the very Near Future, with a strong emphasis on action at sea. Of his singletons, Show of Force (1980) depicts sea battles between East and West in a similar context, with ...
Clute, Judith
(1942- ) Canadian artist, active from 1961, in the UK from 1969; married to John Clute from 1964. Her work as an illustrator of fantastic fiction has been of less importance than her work as a painter and etcher, though she has done interior work for various magazines, and covers from the 1970s for books by various authors including John Clute, Colin Greenland, Joe ...
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 ...