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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.
Site updated on 4 December 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 ...
Unknown
US magazine, 39 issues, March 1939 to October 1943, published by Street & Smith, edited by John W Campbell Jr; pulp-size March 1939 to August 1941, letter-size October 1941 to April 1943, then back to pulp-size to October 1943; monthly March 1939 to December 1940, then bimonthly. / The fantasy companion to Astounding Science-Fiction, Unknown was one of the most sophisticated of ...
Benjamin, Chloe
(? - ) US author whose first novel, The Anatomy of Dreams (2014), edges into the fantastic through its protagonists' obsessive quest to acquire lucid dreaming skills (see Virtual Reality), guided and perhaps deluded by a shamanic researcher. / The Immortalists (2018) similarly engages its four protagonists – who in 1969 have had their futures told by a psychic capable of actual ...
Day After Tomorrow, The
Film (2004). Twentieth Century Fox/Centropolis Entertainment/Lions Gate/Mark Gordon Company. Directed by Roland Emmerich. Written by Emmerich, Jeffrey Nachmanoff. Cast includes Jake Gyllenhaal, Ian Holm, Dash Mihok, Dennis Quaid, Emmy Rossum, Sela Ward and Kenneth Welsh. 124 minutes. Colour. / The third of Roland Emmerich's Disaster movies after Independence Day (1996) and ...
Quantum Computers
A still largely theoretical but eagerly researched breed of Computers which use quantum superposition to deal simultaneously with all possible values which can be represented as "qubits" (quantum bits, as opposed to conventional computer bits representing 0 or 1) in a quantum register. Experimental devices with small numbers of qubits have been tested; if workable on a larger scale, the technology should be capable of processing speeds vastly greater than normal ...
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 ...