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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.
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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 ...
Spooks!
Short US film (1953). Columbia Pictures. Directed by Jules White. Written by Felix Adler. Cast includes Steve Calvert, Larry Fine, Moe Howard, Shemp Howard, Tom Kennedy, Norma Randall and Philip Van Zandt. 16 minutes. Black and white. / The Three Stooges (at the time, Fine, Moe Howard, and Shemp Howard) are private detectives (see Crime and Punishment) hired to find a missing woman. They disguise themselves as pie salesmen and go from door to ...
Meidän poikamme ilmassa – me maassa
["Our Boys in the Air, Us on the Ground"] Finnish film (1934). Suomen Filmiteollisuus. Directed and written by Erkki Karu. Cast includes Kaarlo Angerkoski, Martta Kontula, Joel Rinne and Irja Simola. 121 minutes. Black and white. / Pilots of the Finnish air force compete in a race across southern Finland to test the limits of their planes. In the process, two of them fall in love with women they meet on their travels. When a fire breaks out at a farmhouse, Erkki (Angerkoski) rushes ...
Spaceships
The suggestion that people might one day travel to the Moon inside a flying machine was first put forward seriously by John Wilkins in 1638. There had been cosmic voyages prior to that date, and there were to be many more thereafter (see Fantastic Voyages; Space Flight), but few took the mechanics of the journey seriously enough to invest much imaginative effort in ...
Birkmaier, Elizabeth G
(1847-1912) US author, known only for her sf novel about Atlantis, Poseidon's Paradise: The Romance of Atlantis (1892); the Island, whose rulers are corrupt, sinks after an earthquake, though two abducted royal European children escape to what will become Greece, which they begin to civilize, aided by Atlantean lore. [JC]
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 ...