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Saturday 9 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 ...
Van der Graaf Generator
UK prog-rock band comprising Peter Hammill, Hugh Robert Banton (1949- ) and Guy Evans (1947- ). Highly regarded in the narrow world of English prog, the group released a series of musically soursweet and ornately complex albums whose obscure lyrics trace out fantastical versions of ordinary life that shade, often, into a more structured fabulation. The first album, The Aerosol Grey Machine (1969), ...
Revolutionary Girl Utena
Japanese animated tv series (1997). Original title Shōjo Kakumei Utena. Created by Be-Papas. J.C.Staff. Directed by Kunihiko Ikuhara. Written by Yōji Enokido. Voice cast includes Yuriko Fuchizaki, Tomoko Kawakami, Jūrōta Kosugi and Hikaru Midorikawa. 39 23-minute episodes. Colour. / As newly orphaned Utena Tenjou (Kawakami) mourns, she is comforted by a travelling Prince, who gives her a ring with a rose crest. Utena is so ...
Ure, Jean
(1943- ) UK author of a wide range of fiction for Young Adult readers, her active career beginning with the nonfantastic Dance for Two (1960) and continuing for well over half a century. Relatively little of her work is of sf interest, the main exception being the dark Plague 99 sequence comprising Plague 99 (1989; vt Plague 1991), Come Lucky April (1992; vt ...
Upstream Color
Film (2012). erbp. Written and directed by Shane Carruth. Cast includes Meredith Burke, Carruth, Kathy Carruth, Thiago Martins, Amy Seimetz and Andrew Sensenig. 96 minutes. Colour. / A conceptual designer (Seimetz) is infected with a mind-controlling Parasite (see Parasitism and Symbiosis) by a thief (Martins) who empties her accounts and leaves her with no memory of her ordeal; she and other victims are ...
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 ...