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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 ...
Adam, Ruth
(1907-1977) UK author and broadcaster, in whose pacifist War on Saturday Week (1937) totalitarian "emergency" measures are imposed upon a Near Future Great Britain as war looms. [JC]
Kearney, Susan
(1955- ) US author, usually of paranormal romances like the Pendragon Legacy [for titles see Checklist], though some of her work – especially the loose unnamed series comprising The Challenge (2005), The Dare (2005) and The Ultimatum (2006) – is amply tinged with sf. In the first of these, a secret agent finds love in the future through Time Travel; in the second, an ...
Frazetta, Frank
(1928-2010) American illustrator, born Frank Frazzetta; he dropped the second "z" to create what he thought would be a better professional name. A native New Yorker, he studied at the Brooklyn Academy of Fine Arts and, at the age of sixteen, began drawing professionally for Comics. He worked on the comic strips Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, Flash Gordon, and (for nine years) ...
Patrouch, Joseph F, Jr
(1935- ) US author and critic who has written some short sf but first began to publish work of genre interest with two booklets on the sf of Isaac Asimov: Isaac Asimov's I, Robot: A Study Guide (1972 chap) and The Short Fiction of Isaac Asimov: A Study Guide (1972 chap). These were presumably spinoffs from his more substantial work The Science Fiction of Isaac Asimov (1974), completed in graduate ...
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 ...