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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 ...
Pereira, W D
(1921-2014) UK aviation engineer, advertising executive and author whose first books, beginning with Time of Departure (1956), concentrated on flying. He began writing sf with Aftermath 15 (1973), which depicts a Dystopian Post-Holocaust America whose inhabitants are rigidly stratified according to how much radiation they have absorbed. The projected sequels, «Aftermath 16» and ...
Project Moonbase
Film (1953). Galaxy Pictures/Lippert. Directed by Richard Talmadge. Written by Robert A Heinlein, Jack Seaman. Cast includes Ross Ford, Larry Johns, Donna Martell and Hayden Rorke. 63 minutes, cut to 51 minutes. Black and white. / This rarely seen film is of interest mainly because Heinlein worked on the screenplay. A three-strong expedition takes off from a Space Station orbiting Earth to select a site for a ...
Flanagan, Richard
(1961- ) Australian author whose third novel, Gould's Book of Fish: A Novel in Twelve Fish (2001) describes early Australian history – specifically the deeply troubled culture of Tasmania – in terms at points reminiscent of the Magic Realism techniques used by Latin American writers in their manufacture of national myths of origin; the tale is a central example of what has come to be known as Tasmanian Gothic, ...
Weitz, Chris
(1969- ) US screenwriter, producer, director and author, whose version of Philip Pullman's The Golden Compass (2007), which he directed and for which he wrote the screenplay, received some criticism for its softening of the author's iconoclastic take on Religion. Weitz is of specific sf interest for his Young World sequence comprising The Young World (2014), ...
Robinson, Roger
(1943- ) UK computer programmer, bibliographer and publisher, active in UK Fandom for many years. The Writings of Henry Kenneth Bulmer (1983 chap; rev 1984 chap) is an exhaustive Bibliography of one of the most prolific sf writers, and Who's Hugh?: An SF Reader's Guide to Pseudonyms (1987) is similarly exhaustive in its listing of Pseudonyms. ...