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Sunday 19 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.
Site updated on 17 January 2025
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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 ...
Mantegazza, Paolo
(1831-1910) Italian neurologist, physiologist, anthropologist and author whose early advocacy of the theory of Evolution was channelled through a hierarchical understanding of the course of human development and history (see Social Darwinism), a global understanding of the world that shapes the proto-Futurism (see Filippo Tommaso Marinetti) of his enthusiastic ...
Johns, Stratford
(1925-2002) South African actor, in the UK from 1948; best known for his long stint as Barlow in the BBC television police procedural series Z Cars, and its sequels and spin-offs, between 1962 and 1976. His sf novel for Young Adult readers, Gumphlumph (1966), about an Alien visitor to Earth, is of modest interest. [JC]
Rikhye, Ravi
(1946- ) Indian author whose The Fourth Round Indo-Pak War (1982) is set in the Near Future, where the ongoing conflict between India and Pakistan escalates as the latter country begins to develop a nuclear capacity; outright War soon ensues. [JC]
Trust and Betrayal: The Legacy of Siboot
Videogame (1987). Designed by Chris Crawford. Platforms: Mac. / Siboot is a rare example of an attempt to make use of emergent narrative techniques in a Videogame (see Interactive Narrative). The player takes the part of an Alien religious acolyte competing against a number of other ...
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 ...