SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 21 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 20 January 2025
Sponsor of the day: Ted Chiang
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 ...
Fantastyka
Polish monthly Magazine launched in the gloomy times of martial law in October 1982 as the first press publication exclusively devoted to Fantastika (John Clute's umbrella term is consciously and deliberately evoked here as derived from the Eastern European languages, including Polish "fantastyka", which universally covers all literature with fantastic elements in it and rather naturally was chosen as ...
Kavenna, Joanna
(? - ) UK journalist and author some of whose novels make sophisticated use of the SF Megatext, like her second, The Birth of Love (2010), where an intense narrative analysis and presentation of the nature of childbirth is broken into four sequences, the first three of them nonfantastic. The fourth narrative is set in a Dystopian Near Future, a ...
Anderson, Kevin J
(1962- ) US technical author and author, married to Rebecca Moesta; he began publishing sf with "Luck of the Draw" in Space and Time (Winter 1982/1983 #63), and gradually became a prolific contributor of short fiction and articles to various sf journals, over 100 items having been published by 1992. His first novel, Resurrection, Inc. (1988; vt ...
Batchelor, John M
(? -? ) US author whose nonfantastic novel, A Strange Conflict (1888), is directly sequeled by A Strange People (1888), a Lost Race tale set in the depths of Mexico where tourists discover a hidden world inhabited by Robot (or robot-like) giants (see Great and Small). They are long-lived bronze Telepathic ...
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 ...