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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 ...
Aikin, Jim
Working name of US author James Douglas Aikin (1948- ), most of whose books are technical manuals for producing electronic music. His first sf novel, Walk the Moons Road (1985), gives operatic colour to a moderately intricate Planetary Romance featuring Aliens, humans, seas, Politics and Sex on a planet which is not Earth. His second novel, ...
Douglass, Ellsworth
Pseudonym of US real-estate speculator, insurance broker and author Elmer Dwiggins (1863-1933), whose enterprises (for which he was jailed in 1919-1920) took him to various countries around the turn of the century; his fiction, including his one sf novel, was written during these travels. His first story, "The Wheels of Dr Ginochio Gyves" (September 1899 Cassell's Magazine) with Edwin Pallander, describes a gyroscopically controlled ...
Schneider, Robert
(1961- ) Austrian playwright and author whose first novel, Schlafes Bruder (1992; trans Shaun Whiteside as Brother of Sleep 1995), edges into sf-tinted Fantastika through the life of its protagonist, Jophannes Elias Alder, a nineteenth-century musical prodigy (see Music) whose precocious compositions are made possible through what might be described as a ...
Women in SF
In "The Image of Women in Science Fiction" (November 1970 Red Clay Reader) Joanna Russ wrote, "There are plenty of images of women in science fiction. There are hardly any women." This apprehension of the state of affairs has changed in the subsequent decades, chiefly due to the impact of Feminism and to the increasing numbers of women writing sf in the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s and the new century, though also to an increased ...
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 ...