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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 ...
Pollack, Neal
(1970- ) US journalist, improv-comedian, editor and author; active from the early 1990s. His Satirical journalism, which has appeared in McSweeney's, New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair and elsewhere, takes a gonzo attitude to modern American culture, both literary and Political, as demonstrated in his first collection, The Neal Pollack Anthology of American Literature (first appeared ...
MacColl, Hugh
(1837-1909) Scottish mathematician of some eminence (though forgotten until recently in the UK) and author of Mr Stranger's Sealed Packet (1889), an interplanetary Scientific Romance couched as Children's SF, which describes an Antigravity-powered journey via Spaceship to Mars, and the discovery there of two races of ...
Parks, Brad
(1974- ) US journalist and author, active from the late 1990s, best-known for his nonfantastic thrillers; he is of sf interest for Unthinkable (2021), in which an amiable house-husband is put into the position of having to kill his crusading lawyer wife in order to save untold numbers of lives at some point in the future. The man coercing him – who is both gifted with Precognitive powers and heads a ...
Maguire, Don
(1852-1933) US itinerant trader in the Arizona and elsewhere, and author whose reminiscences of his adventurous life, published long after his death as Gila Monsters and Red-Eyed Rattlesnakes: Don Maguire's Arizona Trading Expeditions, 1876-1879 (1997), may be as imaginative as The American Adventurer (coll 1879), a collection of stories, some of them tall tales. One, "The Story of the Second Traveler", is of sf interest: a shipwrecked sailor is rescued, taken to ...
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 ...