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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 ...
Barbarella
1. Comic strip created by French artist Jean-Claude Forest (1930-1998) for V-M Magazine in 1962. The adventures of the scantily clad blonde astronaut on the planet Lithion, a typical Planetary Romance venue, were collected as Barbarella (graph coll 1964; trans Richard Seaver 1966). Despite its humorous treatment of the soft-focus Sex she engages in with various young ...
Gibson, Gary
(1965- ) Scots author who began publishing work of genre interest with "Mother Love" for Skeleton Crew in March 1991, and whose first novel, Angel Stations (2004), neatly follows the pattern of the "new Space Opera", the kind of baroquely expansive tale which exfoliated in the late twentieth century and whose most comprehensive example may be Dan Simmons's Hyperion Cantos (omni ...
Olsen, Per G
(1944-2016) Norwegian author born Olsen who later changed his name to Hvidsten but continued to publish as Olsen. During the sixties and the following decades he was involved in almost every imaginable activity, both professionally and fan-related. He started as editor of the Fanzine Alhabor and a member of several APAs, and later turned to film-related fanzines such as Filmfan and Filmforum ...
Wyatt, Patrick
Pseudonym of a UK author (? - ), possibly female. Wyatt's Irish Rose (1975) is a love story set in a Post-Holocaust world, after the "Pill War" – instigated by the sterility and dying off of almost all white women through their use of a poisonous form of the Pill; a misogynist, homosexual society has grown up in Ireland, but the protagonist, dodging its worst effects, begins to benefit from the ...
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 ...