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Tuesday 28 November 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 ...
Resident Evil
Videogame (1996; vt Biohazard in Japan). Capcom. Designed by Shinji Mikami. Platforms: PS1 (1996); Saturn, Win (1997); rev GC (2002); rev vt Resident Evil: Deadly Silence NDS (2006); rev Wii (2008). / Resident Evil was not the first game that could be categorized as Survival Horror, but it was the game that codified the form. The gameplay focuses on puzzle ...
Agnew, Spiro T
(1918-1996) American politician who served as governor of Maryland (1967-1969) and as vice president under Richard Nixon (1969-1973) until he was forced to resign in late 1973 after pleading no contest to a charge of tax evasion. He then tried his hand at fiction with The Canfield Decision (1976), an inept, widely derided Technothriller involving the efforts of an unscrupulous vice president to gain control of America in 1983; his machinations ...
Batchelor, John Calvin
(1948- ) US author whose first two novels, The Further Adventures of Halley's Comet (1980) and The Birth of the People's Republic of Antarctica (1983), are borderline fantasy and sf respectively. He has also published two mainstream novels, American Falls (1985) and Gordon Liddy Is My Muse, by Tommy "Tip" Paine (1990). With John R Hamilton he wrote Thunder in the Dust: Images of Western Movies (1987). / ...
Harrison, Payne
(1948- ) US journalist and author of Technothrillers, two of which edge into sf: Storming Intrepid (1989), which extrapolates a Near Future USSR/USA conflict based on a development of Star Wars (events soon outdated the tale); and Thunder of Erebus (1991), also set in the Near Future, during a peril-inducing expedition to drill deep into the ...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 ...