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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.
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 ...
Conklin, Groff
(1904-1968) US editor who began his career as manager of Doubleday Book Stores 1930-1934, and who intermittently held various editing positions, in and out of commercial publishing, for the rest of his life; he was, however, primarily a freelance. The first of his many sf Anthologies was The Best of Science Fiction (anth 1946; vt The Golden Age of Science Fiction 1980), a huge compendium which vied in size and potential influence with ...
Leading Edge, The
US Semiprozine produced by students at Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah. It began in April 1981 and has generally appeared twice yearly; occasionally (as in 1987 and 2015) there were three issues, and in several other years only a single issue. The Leading Edge is published in a perfect-bound Digest format. It is edited by the students, usually an individual or group for an academic year at a time, and therefore the ...
Rata
Pseudonym of Welsh-born journalist and author Thomas Richard Roydhouse (1862-1943), in New Zealand from the late 1880s and then Australia; in his Near Future Yellow Peril novel, The Coloured Conquest (1904), Japan conquers Australia and the rest of the world; by 1913 whites everywhere are doomed. [JC]
Meeker, Nathan Cook
(1817-1879) US journalist with the New York Tribune; developer who, backed by his editor Horace Greeley (1811-1872), founded the Union Colony in the Colorado Territory on Utopian lines; and Indian Agent for the federal government, in which capacity he was killed by Utes driven to that extremity by his insistence that they take up farming and observe the Christian Religion; and author. He is of sf interest for his ...
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 ...