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Thursday 7 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.
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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 ...
Vibbert, Marie
(1974- ) US author who began to publish work of genre interest with "Brain Trust" in Reflection's Edge for February 2006. Her first novel, Galactic Hellcats (2021), describes with mild gusto its two protagonists' adventures with "space motorcycles" as, variously pursued, they upset the applecart on a planet new to them, and continue their flight to interstellar glory. In the Near Future MegaDeath (2022) ...
Reed, Carmen
(? -? ) US author in whose Earth's Empress and Victoria: A Romance of Two Queenly Souls and of a Revolt in Africa Against a Benign Government (1901) two narrative strands, perhaps unconvincingly, intertwine: a lightly fictionalized dramatization of the Boer War (1899-1902) and a Lost World tale set in the mid-Atlantic, where a Utopian civilization has adapted to life ...
de Vere, Howard
Pseudonym of US author William Howard Van Orden (?1816-?1894), active in the later nineteenth century as an author of tales for Boys' Papers. Three titles have been discovered to be of sf interest: The Demon of the Deep; Or, Above and Beneath the Waves (1876 The Boys of New York; 1893 chap), an Under the Sea adventure for boys with Inventions galore, including a submarine ...
Crawford, Chris
(1950- ) US Game designer, important in the early years of commercial Videogame development and subsequently noted for his distaste for the direction taken by the industry. Crawford was an enthusiastic player of board and counter Wargames who went on to design many of the seminal Computer Wargames, including Tanktics (1976) – his ...
Robinson, Roger
(1943- ) UK computer programmer, bibliographer and publisher, active in UK Fandom for many years. The Writings of Henry Kenneth Bulmer (1983 chap; rev 1984 chap) is an exhaustive Bibliography of one of the most prolific sf writers, and Who's Hugh?: An SF Reader's Guide to Pseudonyms (1987) is similarly exhaustive in its listing of Pseudonyms. ...