SF Encyclopedia Home Page
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
Sponsor of the day: Andy Richards of Cold Tonnage Books
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 ...
Sarac, Roger
Pseudonym of US photographer, motion-picture executive, broadcaster and author Roger Andrew Caras (1928-2001), prolific author of nonfiction on the environment and animals in the wild, all under his own name; as Sarac, he wrote an sf novel, The Throwbacks (1965), about genetic throwbacks (see Apes as Human; Devolution) who are seen as a threat to humans until they are given sanctuary. [JC]
Detre, Professor L
(1874-1939) Probably the German/Hungarian medical scientist and author, possibly born Ladislaus Deutsch, who coined the term antigen; he is less likely to be the Hungarian astronomer, Laszlo Detre (1906-1974), who seems to have had no connection with Germany. Detre's sf novel, Két Világ Harca: Fantasztikus Regény (1935; trans as Kampf Zweier Welten 1935; trans from German as War of Two Worlds 1936), describes an alliance of ants and ...
Zinos-Amaro, Alvaro
(1979- ) Spanish editor and author, in US after around 2003; he began to publish work of sf interest with "Problems of the Solid State" in Farrago's Wainscot for January 2009, and has since also been active as critic, with pieces appearing in New York Review of Science Fiction, Strange Horizons and elsewhere. His ...
Faber, Michel
(1960- ) Dutch/Australian/Scottish author, born in Holland, raised in Australia from the age of seven, resident from 1993 in Scotland, where much of his fiction is located; partner from 2016 of Louisa Young. He is best known for The Crimson Petal and the White (2002), a blockbuster novel set in a nonfantastic Victorian London but narrated as though to a time traveller from the future; a nonfantastic collection, ...
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 ...