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Friday 8 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 ...
Mullen, R D
(1915-1998) US sf critic and scholar, now emeritus professor of English at Indiana State University. Mullen was a founding member of the Science Fiction Research Association. In 1973 he established Science Fiction Studies and was its publisher and, with Darko Suvin, its co-editor through 1978; he returned to the journal as an editor in 1991 and managing editor ...
Herrman, Louis
(1883-1980) UK-born zoologist and author, in South Africa from the early years of the twentieth century; he is the author of a Gulliver tale (see Jonathan Swift), In the Sealed Cave: Being a Modern Commentary on a Strange Discovery Made by Captain Lemuel Gulliver in the Year 1721 and Now Published from Manuscript Notes Recently Come to Light. A Scientific Fantasy (1935), the discovery being that of a tribe of ...
Coon, Susan
Pseudonym of US author Susan Plunkett (1945- ), author under her own name of several romance novels, including contributions to Jove Books's Time Passages multi-author sequence of Timeslip and Time Travel romances; as Coon, she wrote the Living Planet sequence – comprising Rahne (1980), Cassilee (1980), The Virgin (1981) and Chiy-Une ...
Pohle, Robert W, Jr
(1949- ) US author of a Space Opera, Doom of Three Planets (1978), and of a study of the actor Christopher Lee (1922-2015), The Films of Christopher Lee (1983) with Douglas C Hart. The latter is long out of date. [JC]
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 ...