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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 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 ...
Gojira 1985
Film (1985; vt Godzilla 1985). Toho/New World. Directed by Kohji Hashimoto, R J Kizer. Written by Shuichi Nagahara, Lisa Tomei, from a story by Tomoyuki Tanaka. Cast includes Raymond Burr (US version), Keiju Kobayashi and Ken Tanaka. 120 minutes, cut to 91 minutes USA and 87 minutes UK. Colour. / The original screenplay from Gojira (1954) is not credited, but this is effectively a remake of the first film; although it purports to be a sequel, ...
It Happened Here
Film (1966). Rath/Lopert. Directed by Kevin Brownlow, Andrew Mollo. Written by Brownlow, Mollo. Cast includes Honor Fehrson, Fiona Leland, Pauline Murray and Sebastian Shaw. 99 minutes, cut to 93 minutes. Black and white. / Alternate-History stories are rare in sf cinema. This UK film is an exception; it shows what might have happened had Nazi Germany successfully invaded the UK (see Hitler Wins). Shot in a ...
Wingrove, David
(1954- ) UK critic and author who began to publish work of genre interest with "Photographs" in Focus for Spring 1980, though he has written very little short fiction since, some of it as by Fara Jackson. His career has broken into two logical sequences. Initially he concentrated on critical work, the earliest significant example of which – The Immortals of Science Fiction (1980) – was printed but never officially released, due to the ...
Wurlitzer, Rudolph
(1937- ) US screenwriter and author, much of whose film work has been signed Rudy Wurlitzer; he is probably best known for early scripts for films like Two-Lane Blacktop (1971) or Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid (1973), though his first works were novels, most of which may be read as Fabulations in which sf elements are bleakly Equipoisal with a free-floating on-the-road gonzo ...
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 ...