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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.
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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 ...
Mella, John
(circa 1942-2012) US editor – founder of Light: A Quarterly of Light Verse in 1992, which he edited until his death – and author. Transformations (fixup 1975) is an Alternate-History tale about the quest for a transvestite actor, set in a nineteenth- and twentieth-century USA and Europe transfigured by Time Distortions (the narrator, WS or William ...
Invaders from Mars
1. Film (1953). National Pictures/Twentieth Century Fox. Directed by William Cameron Menzies. Written by Richard Blake (and John Tucker Battle, uncredited). Cast includes Helena Carter, Leif Erickson, Arthur Franz and Jimmy Hunt. 78 minutes (82 minutes in Europe). Colour. / A small, disturbing, curiously memorable film by the director of Things to Come (1936), made for children but capable of terrifying them. Through a little boy's ...
Parry, Michel
(1947-2014) Belgian-born anthologist, screenwriter and author, in the UK from childhood; he also wrote or edited as by Carlos Cassaba, Nick Fury, Christopher Lee (having known the actor for many years), Steve Lee, Linda Lovecroft and Eric Pendragon. Of the films he scripted, Xtro (1982) is of sf interest. Almost all of his fiction was horror, his first publication of genre interest being "The Last Bus" in Tandem Horror 2 (anth 1968) edited by ...
Tregarron, Yate
Pseudonym of UK playwright and author Hilda C Adshead (?1901-?1985). The Idle Fairy (1926 chap), under her own name, is a children's fantasy; as Tregarron, she is of sf interest for Murderers' Island (1925), a Near Future tale in which murderers are banished to a penal Island (see Crime and Punishment; Prisons). [JC]
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 ...