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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 ...
Storey, Anthony
(1928- ) UK author – born Anthony Story, although he and other family members mostly used the alternative spelling Storey – formerly a rugby player, and brother of the playwright and novelist David Storey (1933-2017). His Satire-drenched Messiah trilogy – comprising The Rector (1970), The Centre Holds (1973) and The Saviour (1978) – deals with the traumas surrounding the ...
Bachelder, John
(1817-1906) US inventor and author of A.D. 2050: Electrical Development at Atlantis (1890) as by A Former Resident of "The Hub", one of many "answers" to Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward: 2000-1887 (1888). In this early example of the Sequel by Other Hands, fifty years have passed, the world has decayed with the exception of the breakaway land of Atlantis in America, where an ...
Conquest of Space
Film (1955). Paramount. Produced by George Pal, directed by Byron Haskin. Written by James O'Hanlon and others including Barré Lyndon (see Alfred Edgar); based remotely on Das Marsprojekt (1952 Weltraumfahrt; 1952; trans Henry J White as The Mars Project 1953) by Wernher von Braun. Cast includes Walter Brooke, ...
Chapbook
In the early nineteenth century this term described a pamphlet on any of a wide range of subjects – from sermons to sensational tales, often illustrated with woodcuts – sold not through bookshops but by "chapmen", who hawked their wares. In the later nineteenth century, the term began to acquire a contrived antiquarian air, and was used to designate a small book or pamphlet produced for collectors. Although the fake antiquarianism attached to the term has since faded, chapbooks 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 ...