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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 ...
Pearl, Jack
(1923-1992) US author of the Space Eagle sequence, comprising The Space Eagle: Operation Doomsday (1967) and The Space Eagle: Operation Star Voyage (1967), and Tied, unusually, to an individual, Raymond J Meurer. The stories are written for the Young Adult market and involve Inventions implausible in their Near Future 1970s context, including ...
Llewellyn, Alun
(1903-1988) UK lawyer and author active in several genres, whose nonfiction generally focuses on Wales, as with his first known publication, "The Emperor of Britain": King Arthur and his Relation to Wales (lecture delivered 10 December 1930; 1930 chap). Work of some interest includes the political Satires assembled in Confound Their Politics (coll 1934), each tale set in a different imaginary country, and the amused faux-naif ...
Gilbert, Stephen
(1912-2010) Irish businessman, journalist and author whose first novel, The Landslide (1943), is of sf interest, being a Parallel-World fantasy of some complexity in which primeval eggs, exposed by the titular event, begin to hatch into dragons; his second sf novel, Monkeyface (1948), movingly explores the familiar territory of the self-aware ape (see Apes as Human); his third, ...
Kantner, Paul
(1941-2016) US musician, best known as one of the founders of Jefferson Airplane. During the 1970s, when his band was in temporary abeyance, Kantner recorded a sf concept album Blows Against the Empire (1970), released as by "Paul Kantner and Jefferson Starship" (a usage that predated the formation of the group of that name by four years). The album concerns a group of freedom-fighters (they believe in "free minds, free bodies, free dope, ...
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 ...