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Tuesday 28 November 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 27 November 2023
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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 ...
Lundgren, Carl M
(1947- ) American artist. After some early involvement in sf fandom, the self-taught Lundgren first specialized in underground Comics and posters for 1960s rock concerts featuring performers like the Doors, Jimi Hendrix, and Jefferson Airplane; most of these posters, now available for sale on eBay, reflect the "psychedelic" style of the era and interestingly contrast with his more sedate genre work. He moved to New York in the late 1960s and ...
Martin, John S
(1900-1977) US editor – a senior figure in Time magazine from 1924 until after World War Two – and author, whose Near Future sf novel, General Manpower (1938), told as a Future History from a twenty-first-century perspective, depicts a world challenged by General Manpower, a corporation founded to develop J Orestes Jones's Invention of procedures based on strict ...
Van Pallandt, Nicolas
Working name of Dutch director, screenwriter, painter and author Floris Nicolas Ali, Baron van Pallandt (1961-2006), son of Nina van Pallandt (1932- ); mostly in New Zealand from 1994. The Butterfly Night of Old Brown Bear (graph 1992) and Troll's Search for Summer (graph 1994), both heavily illustrated by the author, are fantasies for younger readers. Of direct sf interest is Anvil (1998), set on a world similar to Earth, where ...
Invisibility
The fantasy of being able to make oneself invisible is a common childhood daydream. As with all such daydreams, literary treatments of the theme tend to be cautionary tales; the three-decker novel The Invisible Gentleman (1833) by James Dalton is the most extravagant nineteenth-century example. No good comes of it in such early sf stories as Edward Page Mitchell's "The Crystal Man" (January 1881 The Sun anon), H G ...
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 ...