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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 ...
Vigliante, Mary
Working name of Mary Vigliante Szydlowski (1946- ), who has also published sf as by Jarl Szydlow; she writes woman-centred tales whose taste for violence has struck from the first a note of ambivalence. Titles include The Ark (1978) as by Jarl Szydlow and the Aftermath Books, a Post-Holocaust sequence comprising The Colony (1979) and The Land (1979). Also as Vigliante she has published ...
Keith, William H, Jr
(1950- ) US author who has specialized in Military SF sequences, often Tied to Games or other proprietary worlds; it is presumed that those written for enterprises like the Wargame Battletech are Sharecrops. He is efficient and prolific, but relatively few individual characteristics manifest ...
Wilson, Colin
(1931-2013) UK author of speculative works, who remains best known for his first book, The Outsider (1956), in which he gave graphic expression to the brilliant autodidactism, the erratic system-building mentality, the tendency to treat himself (and a previous few others) as a natural elite, and the voracity for new mental sensations that would mark the very numerous titles he would produce over the next several decades, many of them of some indirect interest to sf and fantasy ...
Queneau, Raymond
(1903-1976) French author, active from about 1920 and a founder member of the Oulipo movement, whose parodic (sometimes harum-scarum) poems and novels occasionally reconstruct mimetic forms into examples of Fantastika, light-heartedly. Pierrot mon Amour (1942; trans J Maclaren-Ross as Pierrot 1950) is particularly fantasticated. Of some interest is Saint Glinglin (1948; trans James ...
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 ...