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Saturday 18 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 ...
Ballou, Arthur
(1915-1981) US business consultant and author of two Young Adult sf novels: Marooned in Orbit (1968), which features a mission to save a disabled spaceship in lunar orbit; and Bound for Mars (1970), featuring some of the same characters as the previous novel, about a space mission endangered by one of its crew after its leaves a Space Station en route to Mars. [JC]
Zanger, Molleen
(1948- ) Panamanian-born US author of a Feminist sf tale, The Year Seven (1993), whose protagonist, and other female survivors, find themselves alone (and liberated) by the elimination of all other animal life, including human males. Gardenias Where There Are None (1994) involves a lesbian romance between a contemporary woman and a long-dead ghost. [JC]
Viger, A
Pseudonym of French geophysicist and author Alphonse Berget (1850-1933), almost certainly the instigator of and senior collaborator in the sf novel L'Anneau de Lumière: grand roman scientifique d'aventures (6 November 1921-4 February 1922 Le Petit Parisien; 1922; trans Brian Stableford as The Ring of Light 2018) with Léon Miral, both signing variously as Miral-Viger, or L ...
Politics
Most of the works which we can characterize with hindsight as Proto SF are political fantasies. The earnest and constructive aspect of this endeavour is generally displayed in Utopias, the mocking and corrosive aspect in Satires. The desire to make political statements has continued to be the main motive force in works of sf by Mainstream Writers, although modern ...
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 ...