SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Wednesday 6 December 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 4 December 2023
Sponsor of the day: Andy Richards of Cold Tonnage Books
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 ...
Szpara, K M
(? - ) US author who began to publish work of genre interest with "Ordinary Souls" in Shimmer for January 2013; his useful anthology Transcendent: The Year's Best Transgender Speculative Fiction (anth 2016), was meant to be the first of an annual series, though no further volumes have appeared. Szpara is primarily of sf interest for his first novel, Docile (2020), set in a ...
Ditko, Steve
(1927-2018) US Comics artist and writer, active from around 1953, his first professional assignment of genre interest being "Stretching Things" by Bruce Hamilton (1900-1974), which was eventually published in Fantastic Fears #5 for February 1954 [for a more detailed description of Ditko's early fantasy and other work, see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below]. A long, complicated but ...
Graham, Jorie
(1950- ) US academic and poet, active from the mid 1970s, in various positions at Harvard University from 1999; recipient of many recognitions, including the Pulitzer Prize, though expectedly no Rhysling Award. Her early work tends not to explore regions of the fantastic, literal or metaphorical, though the linked poems of dramatic transition assembled as Swarm (coll 2000) include mythological figures in vulnerable transit. ...
Donnelly, Desmond
(1920-1974) Indian-born politician, journalist and author, in the UK from 1928, Labour MP from 1950 until he resigned the Whip in 1968, having becoming increasingly right-wing in his views (he opposed the welfare state and advocated flogging). In his Near Future sf novel, The Nearing Storm (1968), the military is forced to take over Britain. Donnelly committed Suicide at Heathrow. [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 ...