SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Sunday 26 January 2025
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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Lynch, David
(1946-2025) US actor, artist and musician and primarily filmmaker whose work extended Surrealism into mainstream Cinema and Television. Lynch's films tend to examine the uneasy truce between rationality and the unconscious mind by revealing how intimations of Sex, Identity and death make themselves felt in modern American communities. The term Lynchian was defined by David Foster ...
Wilder, Myles
(1933-2010) US television comedy scriptwriter and producer, son of filmmaker W Lee Wilder. He was involved with three minor 1950s sf films produced and directed by his father, writing the original story for Phantom from Space (1953) and collaborating on its screenplay with William Raynor, whose solo screenplay for Killers from Space ...
Gothic SF
In current usage a "Gothic" is a romantic novel with a strong element of the mysterious or the supernatural which usually features the persecution of a woman in an isolated locale; but this restricted and specialized use of the word, and the marketing category associated with it, have little to do with most sf. The term "Gothic" entered the English language as a descriptive term for a particular kind of story with the publication of The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story (1764) by ...
Felice, Cynthia
(1942- ) US author who began publishing sf with "Longshanks" for Galileo #2 in 1976. Her first novel, Godsfire (1978), depicts an Alien planet inhabited by felines who dominate the local humans but who have never seen their sun because of the unending rain. Almost too well constructed – almost facile in its zestful plotting – the book demonstrated Felice's technical skill, her romantic ...
Terminator, The
Film (1984). Cinema '84/Pacific Western/Orion. Produced by Gale Anne Hurd. Directed by James Cameron. Written by Cameron, Hurd. Cast includes Michael Biehn, Linda Hamilton and Arnold Schwarzenegger. 107 minutes. Colour. / In 2029 CE a vicious Future War between humans and Machines is raging. To ensure their victory, the machines send back a ...
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 ...