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Wednesday 6 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 ...
Precognition
The usual term for the ESP talent, or Psi Power or Superpower, of seeing into the future. For genuine sf relevance this ability needs to be developed in somewhat more detail than the all too frequent narrative convenience of "some sixth sense warned him ..." Philip K Dick seems to have coined the term "precog" for a thus-gifted person, in "A World of Talent" (October 1954 ...
Oakes, Philip
(1928-2005) UK journalist and author of an Apes as Human tale, Experiment at Proto (1973; vt The Proto Papers 1974); his long experience with Zoos, including the long-running Television documentary series, Zoo Time (1956-1968) in collaboration with Desmond Morris, is reflected in the book's claustrophobic venue. [JC] ...
Charbonneau, Louis
(1924-2017) US journalist and author who also wrote nonfantastic Westerns as by Carter Travis Young; after writing some radio plays at the end of the 1940s, he worked as a journalist for the Los Angeles Times (1952-1971), beginning to publish sf novels with No Place on Earth (1958), about a coercive Dystopia. He produced sf for several years thereafter, publishing: Corpus Earthling (1960), about ...
Winslow, Pauline Glen
(1926-2014) UK author, now resident in the USA, in whose I, Martha Adams (1982) the Cold War suddenly ends in a Russian nuclear strike (see World War Three) and the Invasion of an unprepared America, even though the (now assassinated) President Reagan had secretly redirected funds meant for socialist water projects into developing a secret Weapon, which the ...
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 ...