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
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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 ...
McElroy, John
(1846-1929) US printer, publisher, journalist and author most famous for the nonfiction Andersonville: A Story of Rebel Military Prisons: Fifteen Months a Guest of the So-called Southern Confederacy: A Private Soldier's Experience in Richmond, Andersonville, Savannah, Millen, Blackshear, and Florence (1879), an extremely influential first-person account. Of sf interest is ...
Gore, A K Mosha
(? - ) Supposedly Kenyan author who self-published the long narrative Heavens Eye (circa 2000), which is mainly set on the Utopian planet Warth, one of 500 inhabited planets across the universe. People billions years in the future live in an ideal world filled with many advanced Technologies and Inventions. [JO]
Randle, Kevin D
(1949- ) US author who served in the Army as a helicopter pilot in Vietnam 1968-1969 and in the Air Force as an Intelligence Officer 1976-1986; he has written nonfantastic military fiction as by Eric Helm and Steve MacKenzie [not listed in Checklist below]. He began publishing sf with "Future War" for Combat Illustrated in 1978, but became an active writer only in the 1980s, beginning two sequences in 1980 and 1986 respectively, all titles in collaboration with ...
Gorman, Ed
(1941-2016) US author, principally of crime, western and horror fiction, in which fields his reputation was high. He was active in Fandom in the 1950s and 1960s, in the latter decade publishing the Fanzine Ciln. His principal contribution to sf was his co-authorship as Richard Driscoll of the Star Precinct trilogy with Kevin D Randle; this opens with Star Precinct (1992) and ...
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 ...