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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 ...
Frenkel, James R
(1948- ) US editor, married to Joan D Vinge since 1980. In the late 1970s and early 1980s he was with Dell Books, where he edited (anonymously) the Binary Star books, each comprising two titles bound sequentially (see Dos); for publication details see Checklist below: Binary Star #1 containing Destiny Times Three (March-April 1945 Astounding; 1957; ...
Osborne, Karen
(? - ) US author who began to publish work of genre interest with "Retirement" in Aiofe's Kiss for December 2008; her Memory War sequence beginning with Architects of Memory (2020) is a Hard SF Space Opera, containing elements of Military SF. set in an interstellar environment with resemblances to traditional ...
Wilson, Chris
(1949- ) UK psychologist and author most of whose novels work as a series of attempts to address issues of Identity through narratives featuring solitary Candide-like eccentrics exposed to – but not necessarily trapped by – the world at large. In Gallimauf's Gospel (1986), which is set on a remote Island in the nineteenth century, a monkey is washed ashore and mistaken for a Frenchman, even ...
Sterling, Bruce
(1954- ) US essayist, editor and author whose first published sf was a short story, "Man-Made Self", in an anthology of Texan sf, Lone Star Universe (anth 1976) edited by Geo W Proctor and Steven Utley. His first novel, Involution Ocean (1977), is a memoir of the baroque adventures and moral education of a young man who joins the crew of a dustwhaler, a ship that sails upon a ...
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 ...