SF Encyclopedia Home Page
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 ...
Schwehn, Kaethe
(circa 1979- ) US academic, memoirist and author whose first novel, The Rending and the Nest (2018) is of sf interest for its depiction of a vast Disaster, the disappearance of 95% of the human race, though typically of the Mainstream Writer of SF this "inexplicable" vanishment is more metaphorical than actual. The survivors of this disaster, or some of them, occupy a remote ...
Bradley, Marion Zimmer
(1930-1999) US author, initially of adventure sf with an emphasis on swashbuckling routines, often verging on Sword and Sorcery, though always with a recognizably sf rationale; and of other fairly unremarkable work, some of it (not usually fantastic) under names like Lee Chapman, John Dexter, Miriam Gardner, Valerie Graves and Morgan Ives. She began publishing short stories professionally in 1953 with "Women Only" and "Keyhole", both for ...
Mee's Forest
Chinese animated webseries (2009-2010). Original title Xiaomi De Senlin. Wawayu Cartoon. Directed by Busifan (real name Zhigang Yang). Sixteen 6- to 11-minute episodes. Colour. / A beggar child training to become a monk washes in a forest river; the monk accompanying him, Shifu, admits they may be lost, but tells the boy to wait whilst he collects alms. When he does not return the boy searches for him, only finding their hat, which he reluctantly ...
Crispin, Edmund
Pseudonym for his literary work of UK composer, author and editor Robert Bruce Montgomery (1921-1978), who remains best known for his nine Gervase Fen detective novels, beginning with The Case of the Gilded Fly (1944; vt Obsequies at Oxford 1945), plus two collections of short detective stories mostly also starring Fen, all as by Edmund Crispin. He also reviewed crime fiction for the Sunday Times and, as a composer – here always under his real ...
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 ...