SF Encyclopedia Home Page
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 ...
Defontenay, C I
(1819-1856) French physician – he has been described as the inventor of plastic surgery – and author whose Star, ou Ψ de Cassiopée: histoire merveilleuse de l'un des mondes de l'espace, nature singulière, coutumes, voyages, littérature starienne, poèmes et comédies traduits du starien (1854; trans P J Sokolowski as Star (Psi Cassiopeia) 1975 US, with intro by Pierre Versins) ...
Cockcroft, T G L
(1926-2013) New Zealand fan and bibliographer, in employment with IBM from the pre-electronic punched-card era. In spite of his relative isolation in New Zealand, he was a regular Fanzine contributor and corresponded with Fandom worldwide from an early age. He had letters published in Amazing Stories in the mid-1940s, but his main contributions to the genre were detailed bibliographies, in particular ...
Kilroy-Silk, Robert
(1942- ) UK broadcaster, politician (Labour MP 1974-1986) and occasional author, prominent in the first two roles for a volatility, ambition, party-changing episodes, and a growing Euroscepticism; he has often been lampooned in the media. His sf novel, The Ceremony of Innocence: A Novel of 1984 (1983), set in the very Near Future, reflects these tendencies and convictions. [JC]
St John, Arthur
(1862-1938) Indian-born author, in UK from early years; his only slightly fictionalized Utopia, Why Not Now?: A British Islander's Dream (1939), promulgates a pastoral, neighbourhood-based Near Future Britain. [JC]
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 ...