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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 ...
Reinganum, Victor
(1907-1995) UK artist associated with British Surrealism (see Illustration) before 1940, as demonstrated in his illustrations for Straw in the Hair: An Anthology of Nonsensical and Surrealist Verse (anth 1938) edited by Denys Kilham Roberts (1903-1976) (see Poetry). Much of his work was for fiction outside the sf field, including most of the early novels, some of fantasy interest, of Muriel Spark [see The ...
Frazer, Shamus
Working name of UK author James Ian Arbuthnot Frazer (1912-1966), whose first sf novel, Acorned Hog (1933), depicts a socialist Dystopia established in a Near Future Britain where the universities are closed and students sent back to the soil; by the end of the tale, however, a restored monarchy turns to a savage feudalism, with all industry peremptorily banned to America; the Satire is ...
Packard, Frank L
(1877-1942) Canadian author known almost exclusively for the Jimmy Dale the Gray Seal sequence of thrillers, beginning with "The Gray Seal" (May 1914 People's Magazine), which was later assembled with other stories as The Adventures of Jimmie Dale (coll of linked stories 1917), several further volumes following until 1935. With his secret identity, his "Fortress of Solitude", his hidden wealth, his moral imperatives and his remarkable physical skills, Jimmy Dale ...
Fletcher, J S
(1863-1935) UK journalist and author of popular fiction, much of it for boys, though he is best known for his detective fiction. The Wonderful City (1894), for instance, carries its youthful protagonist to a Lost World in Western America at the famous Four Corners where Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah meet; unfortunately, the inhabitants' ecologically sound lives count for little when a great volcano erupts. Morrison's Machine ...
Robinson, Roger
(1943- ) UK computer programmer, bibliographer and publisher, active in UK Fandom for many years. The Writings of Henry Kenneth Bulmer (1983 chap; rev 1984 chap) is an exhaustive Bibliography of one of the most prolific sf writers, Kenneth Bulmer, and Who's Hugh?: An SF Reader's Guide to Pseudonyms (1987) is similarly exhaustive in its ...