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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
Sponsor of the day: Joe Haldeman
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 ...
Payson, William Farquhar
(1876-1939) US author whose explanation, in John Vytal: A Tale of the Lost Colony (1901), of the disappearance around 1584 of the inhabitants of Roanoke Island (in what would become the state of Virginia) is made into a tale with Lost Race implications. [JC]
Delorme, Charles
Pseudonym of French-born author Charles Rumball (1825-1894), in UK in early life, in Canada from 1844, where he had a small reputation, in London, Ontario and elsewhere, for his burlesque writings. The Marvellous and Incredible Adventures of Charles Thunderbolt, in the Moon (1851), composed as a juvenile, is intriguingly detailed in its description of a steam-driven Spaceship which carries the eponymous Thunderbolt to the ...
Harrison, Payne
(1948- ) US journalist and author of Technothrillers, two of which edge into sf: Storming Intrepid (1989), which extrapolates a Near Future USSR/USA conflict based on a development of Star Wars (events soon outdated the tale); and Thunder of Erebus (1991), also set in the Near Future, during a peril-inducing expedition to drill deep into the ...
Synchronic
Film (2019). Patriot Pictures in association with Pfaff and Pfaff Productions, Love and Death Productions and Rustic Films. Directed by Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead. Written by Justin Benson. Cast includes Katie Aselton, Jamie Dornan, Allie Ioannides, Anthony Mackie and Ramiz Monsef. 102 minutes. Colour. / New Orleans paramedics Steve (Mackie) and Dennis (Dornan) encounter a spate of unusual and baroque deaths among the City's drug-using population, ...
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 ...