SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Saturday 25 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 24 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 ...
Wells, Catherine
Working name of US author Catherine Jean Wells Dimenstein (1952- ) who began publishing sf with the tightly-woven Coconino sequence – comprising The Earth Is All That Lasts (1991), Children of the Earth (1992) and The Earth Saver (1993) – set aeons hence in a Ruined Earth devastated by Climate Change and other ...
Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog
US Serial Film (2008). Timescience Bloodclub/Mutant Enemy. Directed by Joss Whedon. Written (including songs) by Joss Whedon, Zack Whedon, Maurissa Tancharoen, & Jed Whedon; lyrics by Joss Whedon, Tancharoen, and Jed Whedon; music by Joss Whedon and Jed Whedon. Cast includes Felicia Day, Nathan Fillion, Neil Patrick Harris and Simon Helberg. 3 episodes; 42 minutes total. Colour. / Written during the 2007-2008 ...
Niven, Larry
Working name of US author Laurence van Cott Niven (1938- ). He was born in California, where he set many of his stories, and gained a BA in mathematics from Washburn University, Kansas. From his first publication, "The Coldest Place" for If in December 1964, he set his mark on the US sf field as a Hard SF writer of remarkable vigour and inventiveness, soon winning four short-fiction Hugos: for ...
Whiting, Sydney
(1820/1821-1875) UK barrister, poet and author whose Memoirs of a Stomach: Written by Himself, That All Who Eat May Read (1853; rev 1853; further rev 1855) as by "The Minister of the Interior", though seemingly spoofish, articulates issues of the relationship between imperial mind and digestive body in mid-nineteenth-century terms. Of more sf interest is Heliondé; Or, Adventures in the Sun (1854; rev 1855), whose protagonist, conveniently ...
Robinson, Roger
(1943- ) UK computer programmer, bibliographer and publisher, active in UK Fandom for many years. The Writings of Henry Kenneth Bulmer (1983 chap; rev 1984 chap) is an exhaustive Bibliography of one of the most prolific sf writers, Kenneth Bulmer, and Who's Hugh?: An SF Reader's Guide to Pseudonyms (1987) is similarly exhaustive in its ...