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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 ...
Kingsmill, Hugh
Working name of UK author and anthologist Hugh Kingsmill Lunn (1889-1949), who spent part of World War One in a prison camp, and who remains best known for An Anthology of Invective and Abuse (anth 1929). The Dawn's Delay (coll 1924) contains "The End of the World", of interest for its vision of a solar system populated by various species (see End of the World), and "W.J.", about a ...
Langley, Kenlis
Working name of Indian-born soldier and author Kenlis Langley Stevenson (1875-1946), in UK from an early age, in Canada from some point after World War One; his juvenile novel (see Children's SF), The Mountain of Mystery: A Tale of the Arabian Desert (1929), is set in a Lost World discovered by boy adventurers in North Africa. [JC]
Ansible
The Imaginary-Science device invented by Ursula K Le Guin for instantaneous communication between two points, regardless of the distance between them. The speculative Physics which led to its invention is described in The Dispossessed (1974), but the communicator is mentioned in a number of the Hainish series of stories written before The Dispossessed – the ...
Jensen, Jane
(1963- ) US computer programmer, Game designer and author who began publishing work of genre interest with "A Mother's Love" for The Scream Factory in 1991, and whose Gabriel Knight sequence – comprising Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers (1997) and Gabriel Knight: The Beast Within (1998) – are technically Ties, though they are based on her own sequence of ...
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 ...