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Thursday 23 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.
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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 ...
Mansford, Charles J
(1863-1943) UK teacher and author, some of whose stories assembled as Shafts from an Eastern Quiver (coll of linked stories July 1892-June 1893 Strand; 1894) are supernatural; Under the Naga Banner (1896), a romance told in the manner of H Rider Haggard, climaxes in the discovery in Nagaland of the Ark of the Covenant; The Great Green Serpent (1926) is a ...
N3F
The National Fantasy Fan Federation, formed in the USA in 1941; this was the brain-child of Damon Knight, who called for it in a Fanzine article titled "Unite – or Fie!" (October 1940 Fanfare ed Art Widner). After a succession of short-lived and factional US fan associations in the 1930s, the N3F proved a stable and enduring national organization. However, despite its long existence, it has maintained a relatively low ...
Van Gelder, Gordon
(1966- ) US editor, publisher and author who published his first story "Santa's Tenth Reindeer" in 100 Great Fantasy Short Short Stories (anth 1984) edited by Isaac Asimov, Terry Carr and Martin H Greenberg, though the majority of his career has been spent as an editor. After a brief internship at Bluejay Books in 1986, ...
Barthelme, Donald
(1931-1989) US author known primarily as a surrealist and black humorist. Most of his short fiction and at least three of his four novels can be described as Fabulations (see also Absurdist SF): Snow White (1967), an absurdist dissection of the fairy tale; The Dead Father (1975), in which the giant figure of a moribund Father is escorted with trauma and ritual to its final resting place; and ...
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 ...