D. G. Compton is the author of several science-fiction novels written in the 1960s and 1970s that were characterized by their pensive and usually doleful tone, characters under debilitating stress, bleak near-future settings, and a deep concern for the moral dilemmas potentially created by new technology. Compton's science fiction received significant critical notice during those decades in the United States as well as in his native England for its depth of characterization, concern with mature themes, and rich prose style. His novels joined those of other British science-fiction authors of that period in having a significant influence on many other writers within the science-fiction field.

Compton also wrote several non-science-fiction novels and radio plays and is one of the few successful writers in the genre to have entered without any background or knowledge of science-fiction literature. Indeed, Compton has stated that he set his early novels in an...