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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.
Site updated on 4 December 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 ...
Koch, Polly
(? - ) US author of Invisible Borders (1991) whose protagonist Timeslips from back and forth between her 1950s childhood and her Near Future life in a commune constructed on Feminist principles; the world of the future is, however, envelopingly Dystopian. [JC]
Drummond, June
(1923-2011) South African author, in London for several years in the 1950s. She wrote almost exclusively detective novels and Regency romances; one of the former, The Gantry Episode (1968; vt Murder on a Bad Trip 1968), edges into sf in its investigation of the planting of the Drug LSD in a reservoir and of the effects thereof. [JC/DRL] see also: Urban Legends. /
Peek, Hedley
(1858-1904) UK biscuit manufacturer, sportswriter, publisher and author of Nema and Other Stories (coll 1895), which contains fantasies; and The Chariot of the Flesh (1897), in which a proto-Superman, who has developed the power of Teleportation and has in other ways grown beyond his home in the West, travels to a hidden community of folk known as Aphar in the Himalayas, where he engages in advanced ...
Kilroy-Silk, Robert
(1942- ) UK broadcaster, politician (Labour MP 1974-1986) and occasional author, prominent in the first two roles for a volatility, ambition, party-changing episodes, and a growing Euroscepticism; he has often been lampooned in the media. His sf novel, The Ceremony of Innocence: A Novel of 1984 (1983), set in the very Near Future, reflects these tendencies and convictions. [JC]
Robinson, Roger
(1943- ) UK computer programmer, bibliographer and publisher, active in UK Fandom for many years. The Writings of Henry Kenneth Bulmer (1983 chap; rev 1984 chap) is an exhaustive Bibliography of one of the most prolific sf writers, and Who's Hugh?: An SF Reader's Guide to Pseudonyms (1987) is similarly exhaustive in its listing of Pseudonyms. ...