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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.
Site updated on 20 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 ...
Sense of Wonder
A term used to describe the sensation which, according to the Cliché of fan criticism that goes back at least to the 1940s, good sf should inspire in the reader. In Metamorphoses of Science Fiction (1979) Darko Suvin summed up the attitude of many critics by describing the term as "another superannuated slogan of much SF criticism due for a deserved retirement into the same limbo as extrapolation". And yet ... / ...
Gilmour, William
(? - ) US author who has specialized in pastiches of the work of Edgar Rice Burroughs, including Lost on Jupiter (1962 chap), Tarzan and the Lightning Man (1963 chap) (see Tarzan) and Back to the Earth's Core (1971). More recently, in The Undying Land (1985), he competently pastiched the style of 1920s fantastic adventure- ...
Equilibrium
Film (2002). Dimension Films, Blue Tulip Productions. Directed and written by Kurt Wimmer. Cast includes Christian Bale, Sean Bean, Taye Diggs, William MacFadyen, Sean Pertwee and Emily Watson. Plus one Bernese Mountain dog pup. 107 minutes. Colour. / After the devastation of World War Three, a new regime now rules Near Future America, and by the year 2072 claims to have constructed a world safe from war; as Dupont ...
Strick, Philip
(1939-2006) UK sf and film critic, anthologist, teacher, and director of a film library. In 1969 he initiated one of the first adult evening classes in sf in the UK, sponsored by the University of London at the City Literary Institute (see SF in the Classroom), which continued until 1992 under various tutors including John Clute, Colin Greenland, Peter ...
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 ...