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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.
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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 ...
Wynne-Tyson, Esmé
(1898-1972) UK author, for whose novels written with J D Beresford see the latter entry. [JC]
Whittaker, Frederick
(1838-1889) UK-born author, in USA from 1850; perhaps best known for The Complete Biography of George Armstrong Custer (1876 2vols), which was adulatory. Of his Dime-Novel SF, The Grizzly-Hunters; Or, the Navahoe Captives: A Tale of the Lost City of the Sierras (1871) is a Lost Race tale set in a secret City, which turns out to be inhabited by Aztecs; the two white ...
J A C K
Pseudonym of Scottish author J MacCullough (? -? ) whose Sleeper Awakes novel, Golf in the Year 2000; Or, What We Are Coming To (1892), can initially be understood as a spoof companion to Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward: 2000-1887 (1888) (see Games and Sports), but is in fact a genuine imagined portrait of an ...
Morgan, Chris
(1946- ) UK editor, critic and author who after several appearances in the Amateur Magazines SFinx (from 1969) and Macrocosm (in 1972) began to publish sf professionally with "Clown Fish and Anemone" for Science Fiction Monthly in April 1975. His fiction is generally unexceptional, though some stories – such as "Losing Control" (in ...
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 ...