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 ...
Graphic Novel
To speak of the graphic novel is to speak of a particular kind of Comic book – usually a book-length work in the comics format published in a non-periodical format – but to do so is to risk applying what has become a marketing term to questions of definition, transforming a practical distinction into what looks superficially like a separate genre. In 2004, in response to the widespread misunderstanding of the implications of the term, the artist and ...
Night Stalker
US tv series (2005). Touchstone Television/Big Light Productions for ABC tv. Created by Frank Spotnitz; produced by Lori-Etta Taub, Gary LaPoten. Cast includes Eric Jungmann, Stuart Townsen and Gabrielle Union. Directors included Rob Bowman, Dave Sarafian, Tony Wharmby. Writers included Spotnitz, Vince Gilligan, William Schmidt. Ten 50-minute episodes. Colour. / This short-lived series was both a remake of and a sequel to the original series ...
Star Trek Into Darkness
Film (2013). Paramount Pictures and Skydance Productions present a Bad Robot production. Directed by J J Abrams. Written by Roberto Orci & Alex Kurtzman & Damon Lindelof. Cast includes John Cho, Benedict Cumberbatch, Alice Eve, Bruce Greenwood, Leonard Nimoy, Simon Pegg, Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, Zoë Saldana, Karl Urban, Peter Weller and Anton Yelchin. 133 minutes. Colour, 3D (converted). / After Kirk is demoted following a Prime ...
Smith, Thorne
(1892-1934) US author best known for his humorous fantasies, in which – rather as in the novels of F Anstey, with the added ingredient of Sex – some supernatural intrusion upsets suburban life to comic effect. Two of Smith's novels use nominally sf devices. The Night Life of the Gods (1931) opens with the Invention of a petrifying Ray which can convert flesh to ...
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 ...