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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.
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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 ...
Keller, David H, M D
(1880-1966) US author, physician and psychiatrist, deeply involved in the last capacity in World War One and its consequences, his work focusing on shell shock; he was one of relatively few American sf writers to have anything like the direct experience of War That Will End War that marked so many British authors, a fact that may help explain his abiding cultural pessimism (see Optimism and Pessimism), often expressed ...
Strete, Craig
(1950- ) US author – the suggestion has been bruited that Strete is the pseudonym of a Native American author of Cherokee birth who does not wish to reveal his real name, but this has not been confirmed. He has written as Strete and as by Sovereign Faulkner, and possibly under other names, by himself and in collaboration; at least forty of the eighty or more stories claimed for him must almost certainly be under unrevealed names. As Strete, he began publishing ...
Star Control
Videogame series (from 1990). Toys For Bob (TFB). / Star Control (1990 TFB, Amiga, Amstrad, DOS; 1991 C64, MegaDrive, Spectrum) designed by Fred Ford, Paul Reiche III is a Computer Wargame set during an interstellar war between the Alliance of Free Stars and the Hierarchy of Battle Thralls. The titular Star Control is the military arm of Earth's United Nations, a member of the Alliance. The game ...
Erlich, Richard D
(1943- ) US academic and critic who took his PhD in English Language and Literature at the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign), moving in 1971 to Miami University (Oxford, Ohio), where he remained until his retirement in 2006 as Professor of English. His first essay of sf interest was "Strange Odyssey: From Dart to Ardrey to Kubrick and Clarke" (May 1976 Extrapolation 17.2), which centred on the use in ...
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 ...