SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Sunday 10 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 ...
Futures Studies
"Futures Studies" is the most common name for the interdisciplinary study of potential future developments and conditions. It has displaced earlier terms like Futurology and Futuristics which reflected the goal of creating a new discipline with mathematical tools capable of accurate Prediction. Frequent failures of prediction have tempered that ambition and complexity theory has highlighted the inability of any forecasting methods ...
Morris, Edward
(1975- ) US author of much short fiction collected in Shock Theatre: Collected Speculative Fiction, 2002-2006 (coll 2011) and further volumes [see Checklist below]. There Was a Crooked Man (2009) is a Time Travel tale in which an insane soldier from a post-nuclear future arrives in seventeenth-century America and begins wreaking havoc upon history. The Arkadia trilogy-in-progress, as listed below, is ...
World War Two
The 1939-1945 War was the central military convulsion of the twentieth century, anticipated in numerous Future War scenarios and succeeded – thanks to the climactic use of Nuclear Energy-based Weapons against Japanese Cities – by several Cold War decades overshadowed by the prospect of a nuclear ...
Rabelais, François
(?1483/1494-1553) French monk, doctor, priest and author. The various titles now generally gathered together as Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532-1552 plus a posthumous text of dubious authenticity 1564) were initially published as separate volumes [see Checklist for individual titles plus the translations of same by Sir Thomas Urquhart – first two books 1653, third book 1693 – and Peter Anthony Motteux – fourth and fifth books 1694]. ...
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 ...