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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 ...
Yukikaze
Japanese Original Video Animation (OVA) (2002-2005; original title Sentō Yōsei Yukikaze; vt Battle Fairy Yukikaze). Gonzo. Based on the novels by Chohei Kanbayashi. Directed by Masahiko Ōkura. Written by Seiji Kio, Masahiko Ōkura, Masashi Sogo, Yumi Tada, Hiroshi Yamaguchi and Ikuto Yamashita. Voice cast includes Yōko Asagami, Masako Ikeda, Jōji Nakata, Masato Sakai and Miho Yamada. Five 28- to 48-minute ...
Stapledon, Olaf
(1886-1950) UK author and philosopher, born in the Wirral peninsula near Liverpool, where he spent the greater part of his life. In Waking World (1934) he admitted that he lived "chiefly on dividends and other ill-gotten gains". The name Olaf does not indicate foreign antecedents: his parents had been reading Carlyle's The Early Kings of Norway (coll 1875) when he was born. After studying at Balliol College, Oxford, he worked for a short period without enthusiasm in ...
80 Days
Videogame (2014). inkle. Designed by Meg Jayanth. Platforms: iOS. / 80 Days is a text-based videogame which rewrites Jules Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days (1873; trans 1874) as a Steampunk Adventure. The player witnesses the events of the game through the perspective of the novel's original protagonists; Jean Passepartout, ...
Roth, Veronica
(1988- ) US author whose Young Adult Dystopian Divergent sequence beginning with Divergent (2011) is set in a Near Future Chicago whose population has been divided into five "factions"; the young protagonist discovers on being tested that she is a Divergent, and therefore eligible to join more than one group. Her progress upwards through the ranks of 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 ...