SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Friday 24 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 ...
Peterson, Lorin
(? - ) US author of Ma Windsor (1983), a Near Future Satire on American mores and politics whose protagonist, being elected the first female President of the United States, causes disarray by making the wealthy ineligible to claim social security, reducing the nuclear Weapons stockpile, and bringing all the soldiers home from their international redoubts. ...
Back to the Future Part II
Film (1989). Amblin Entertainment/Universal. Directed by Robert Zemeckis, with Steven Spielberg among the executive producers. Cast includes Michael J Fox, Christopher Lloyd, Lea Thompson and Thomas F Wilson. Written by Bob Gale, based on a story by Zemeckis and Gale. 108 minutes. Colour. / Panned by many critics as a typically disappointing follow-up to Back to the Future ...
Pirandello, Luigi
(1867-1936) Italian playwright and author whose prolific career began with poetry – Mal Giocondo ["Unhappy Joy"] (coll 1889) – and continued with a large amount of short fiction, beginning with Amori senza Amore (coll 1894). Many of his circa 400 stories and sketches, many of them Contes-Cruels [for this term, plus entry on Pirandello with fantasy linkings, see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under ...
Restif de la Bretonne
Name by which the French author Nicolas-Anne-Edmé Restif (1734-1806) is usually known, though he sometimes signed his books N A E Restif de la Bretonne; his surname at birth was simply Rétif, without the spoof addition, which was the name of a family field. He was an extremely prolific author, publishing about 250 volumes in all beginning in 1767, including many formless, semi-autobiographical novels often attacked for imputed pornographic content. Of his ...
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 ...