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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.
Site updated on 27 November 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 ...
Continuum Science Fiction
US low-paying Semiprozine published and edited by William Rupp, Bonsall, California under the imprint Continuum Publishing. It began as a Print Magazine with an advance preview edition, containing two stories, released in November 2003 and then seven formal issues from Winter 2004 to Fall 2006. The first three issues were in an intermediate, half-legal size (8.5 x 7 in; 215 x 175 mm), though dropped to a small review size (8.5 ...
Jones, Peter
(1951- ) UK artist who, ignoring school careers advice to become "a North Sea Trawlerman", enrolled in London's Saint Martin's School of Art, graduating in 1974 and having his first cover art published that year. His Illustrations have the drama of the sf Pulps, with a lively use of colour and intriguing backgrounds – one of his earliest, for Christopher Stasheff's ...
Stintzi, John Elizabeth
Canadian poet and author whose first novel Vanishing Monuments (2020) evokes images out of the Fantastika toolkit to dramatize the growing dementia of its protagonist's mother. They are of sf interest (see in particular Absurdist SF) for their second novel, My Volcano (2022), which multiply Equipoises topoi out of various genres to depict a kind of ...
O'Brien, Fitz-James
(1828-1862) Irish-born US author, whose natal name was Michael O'Brien; active from his arrival in New York in 1852 (when he changed his name to Fitz-James O'Brien) until he died of an infected wound in the Civil War. O'Brien contributed numerous poems and minor stories to the magazines, his first work of genre interest being "An Arabian Nightmare" for Household Words in 1851; but his importance rests on a handful of brilliantly original sf tales, which were influential not only on ...
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 ...