SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Monday 20 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 ...
McIntyre, Ken
(1911-1968) UK artist, active and popular in British Fandom from 1952; best known for his professional contributions to Nebula Science Fiction from 1953 to 1957, comprising four colourful though perhaps not greatly sophisticated front covers depicting planetary landscapes with Spaceships, Robots or Aliens, and one space-themed back cover in ...
Dawson, Saranne
Pseudonym of US author Saranne Hoover (1941- ), who has also written as by Pamela Lind; she is the author of one sf romance, Greenfire (1990), under her own name, a Science Fantasy about the female leader of a tribe called upon to breed an heir, with some absent-minded references to Exogamy. From that point, she has written sf only as Saranne Dawson, beginning with The Enchanted Land ...
Corbett, James
(1887-1958) UK author who served as a lieutenant in the armed forces during World War One and wrote popular thrillers for the lending-library market from 1929 to 1951. Corbett's sf tales, beginning with The White Angel (1931), are as sensational as his thrillers. The Man Who Saw the Devil (1934) is a rewrite of Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde ...
Balscopo, Giovanni Battista
A pseudonym, possibly of the ostensible translator from the Italian of the manuscript of his Satire, John Trotter (1788-1852), though Trotter himself not been identified. In his preface to Travels in Phrenologasto (1825), he claims to have been given Balscopo's manuscript in Bavaria; it is a Fantastic Voyage via Balloon to the planet of Phrenologasto, in close orbit around Earth, whose ...
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 ...