SF Encyclopedia Home Page
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
Sponsor of the day: Andy Richards of Cold Tonnage Books
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 ...
Unwin, Stanley
(1911-2002) South African-born broadcaster, comedian and author, in UK from 1914; best-known for his creation of a comically distorted version of English, a gobbledegookish patter not dissimilar to the effect of Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwocky", which first appeared in Through the Looking-Glass (1871). The Linguistic distortion is superficial but cumulatively compelling; through its mildly antic effect, a sense of an ...
Gorst, Harold E
(1868-1950) UK journalist, editor and author, of whose ten or more works of fiction two are sf: Without Bloodshed: A Probability of the Twentieth Century (1897), a Satire set in a Near Future UK whose socialist government has been subverted by American millionaires for their own advantage; and Sketches of the Future (coll 1898), which contains several further satires, always from a politically and culturally ...
Kirby, Jack
Pseudonym of US comic-book illustrator Jacob Kurtzberg (1917-1994), who was known as Jack Kirby from about 1940, though he does not seem to have taken that name legally; other early pseudonyms include Jack Curtiss, Curt Davis, Ted Grey, Lance Kirby and Fred Sande. One of the giants in the Comics industry, he began his more than fifty-year career in 1936 working on newspaper comic strips for the Lincoln Newspaper Syndicate; briefly, in 1939, he worked for Fleischer ...
Lynch, David
(1946- ) US filmmaker, actor, artist and musician whose work has extended Surrealism into mainstream Cinema and Television. Lynch's films tend to examine the uneasy truce between rationality and the unconscious mind by revealing how intimations of Sex, Identity and death make themselves felt in modern American communities. The term Lynchian has been defined by ...
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 ...