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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.
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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 ...
Knight, Damon
(1922-2002) US author and editor; his third marriage was to Kate Wilhelm. Like many sf writers, Knight became involved in sf Fandom at an early age, and by 1941 was a member of the Futurians in New York, where he shared an apartment with Robert A W Lowndes and met James Blish, C M Kornbluth, ...
Captain Midnight
1. Serial Film (1942). Columbia Pictures. Directed by James W Horne. Written by Basil Dickey, Wyndham Gittens, George Plympton and Jack Stanley, based on the radio serial Captain Midnight (1938-1949) created and written by Wilfred G Moore and Robert M Burtt. 15 episodes; total running time 270 minutes. Cast includes James Craven, Sam Edwards, Knox Manning (narrator), Dave O'Brien and Luana Walters. Black and white. / Highly ...
Grant, Robert
(1852-1940) US judge and author chiefly remembered for Unleavened Bread (1900). With John Boyle O'Reilly (1844-1890), an Irish writer who escaped Australian exile to live in the USA, J S of Dale (a pseudonym of US lawyer and diplomat Frederic Jesup Stimson) and J T Wheelwright (1856-1925), also a New England lawyer, Grant wrote The King's Men: A Tale of To-morrow (1884), set in a republican UK ...
Luca de Tena, Torcuato
(1923-1999) Spanish controversialist, poet and author in whose first novel, La otra vida del capitán Contreras (1953; trans Barnaby Conrad as The Second Life of Captain Contreras 1960), the Sleeper Awakes hero has sharp things to say about the new world he enters. [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 ...