SF Encyclopedia Home Page
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 ...
Riley, Frank
Working name of Frank Rhylick (1915-1996), US author who is mainly known for collaborating with Mark Clifton on They'd Rather Be Right (August-November 1954 Astounding; edited version 1957; vt The Forever Machine 1958; text restored under original title 1981), the Hugo-winning conclusion to Clifton's Bossy series about an advanced Computer ...
Acknowledgments
Virtually all the acknowledgements in the second edition of 1993, as reproduced in the 1995 CD-ROM, still apply – these appear below the following list of third-edition addenda. First come those without whom this online edition would never have appeared. / Gollancz, our publisher from 2011 to 2021, made the third edition possible. The stewardship of the project by Malcolm Edwards and Simon Spanton of Orion/Gollancz is greatly appreciated. Darren ...
Savile, Frank
(1865-1950) UK author who began his writing career under the alias Knarf Elivas (his own names reversed) with John Ship, Mariner (1898), an historical nautical adventure set at the time of the Spanish Armada. His next novel, The Foray of the "Hendrik Hudson" (1898), the first under his own name, is a non-fantasy involving a treasure hunt across Russia and Finland in search of a Viking hoard. This sequence of nautical tales ended in a fully-fledged fantastic ...
System Shock
Videogame (1994). Looking Glass Studios (LG). Designed by Doug Church. Platforms: DOS (1994); Mac (1995). / System Shock is an early First Person Shooter much influenced by Computer Role Playing Games. It is set in a Cyberpunk world, with gameplay which combines puzzle solution, exploration and combat. ...
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 ...