SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Friday 8 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.
Site updated on 4 December 2023
Sponsor of the day: The Telluride Institute
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 ...
Amano Yoshitaka
(1952- ) Japanese artist, rare in the contemporary medium for eschewing the Manga cash-cow in favour of portraiture, book illustration and design. Amano's early work, while still in his teens, was at the Tatsunoko Anime studio, where he soon rose to the rank of character designer establishing the baseline images from which the pool of animators would create the animation itself on shows such as ...
Skaife, S H
(1889-1976) UK-born entomologist and author, in South Africa from 1913; most of his work comprises either technical studies or descriptions of the natural world for general readers. Of sf interest is The Strange Old Man (coll of linked stories 1930), tales in which the Drug-enabled Miniaturization of two children allows them, under the guidance of the eponymous scientist, to tour the air, the land, and ...
Livingston, Berkeley
Working name of the US author born Berkeley Beryl Levinstein (1909-1975), who began to publish work of genre interest with "I'll Be There With Music" Fantastic Adventures for June 1943, publishing his fifty or so stories in that magazine and in its Ziff-Davis stablemate Amazing. He wrote under his own name, as by Burt B Liston, B E Liston and Lester Barclay; he also contributed work under the ...
Fiyah
US semiprofessional quarterly Online Magazine, subtitled "Magazine of Black Speculative Fiction" and also available as an ebook; published by the Niggerati Space Station, a virtual community of writers established by Troy L Wiggins. / Fiyah began in January (Winter) 2017 and is devoted to stories "by and about the Black People of the African diaspora". It was founded by Phenderson Djèlí Clark and ...
Langford, David
(1953- ) UK author, critic, editor, publisher and sf fan, in the latter capacity recipient of 21 Hugo awards for fan writing – some of the best of his several hundred pieces are assembled as Let's Hear It for the Deaf Man (coll 1992 chap US; much exp vt The Silence of the Langford 1996; exp 2015 ebook) as Dave Langford, edited by Ben Yalow – plus five Best Fanzine Hugos ...