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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 ...
Sentinel, The
Videogame (1986; vt The Sentry in the US). Designed by Geoff Crammond. Platforms: C64 (1986); Amstrad, AtariST, BBCMicro, Spectrum (1987); Amiga (1988), DOS (1989). / In The Sentinel, topography is everything. The player adopts the role of a "synthoid", a Robot in a three-dimensional chequerboard landscape overlooked by its eponymous guardian. The Sentinel's gaze slowly scans across ...
Heming, Jack
(1899-1987) UK author of a Lost Race tale, The Lost World of the Colorado (1940), whose young protagonists discover, on a high plateau, Monsters who display a weird caprice of Evolution: each of them combining the features of two real species. [JC]
D.A.R.Y.L.
Film (1985). World Film Services/Columbia. Directed by Simon Wincer. Written by David Ambrose, Allan Scott, Jeffrey Ellis. Cast includes Mary Beth Hurt, Michael McKean, Barret Oliver, Josef Sommer and Kathryn Walker. 100 minutes. Colour. / D.A.R.Y.L. is a Data Analysing Robot Youth Lifeform but, when "he" (Oliver) wakes up Amnesiac in the woods, he thinks he is just a small boy, Daryl. Adopted by a pleasant family, he learns not ...
Frost, Jason
A Zebra Books House Name, used almost exclusively by US author Raymond Obstfeld for the Warlord sequence of Post-Holocaust sf adventures typical in theme and style of most Survivalist Fiction of the 1980s: The Warlord (1983), The Warlord #2: The Cutthroat (1984), The Warlord #3: Badland (1984), ...
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. ...