SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Monday 20 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: Janine G Stinson
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 ...
Martian Manhunter
A DC Comics Superhero created by Joseph Samachson, who first appeared in issue #225 of Detective Comics (1955); in early adventures, he is referred to as J'onn J'onzz, Manhunter from Mars (his Martian name) before his current title became canonical. He is a green-skinned, hairless humanoid who is Teleported from Mars to ...
Unearth
US magazine in Digest format, eight issues, Winter 1977 to Winter 1979, published from Boston by Unearth Publications, edited by Jonathan Ostrowsky-Lantz and John M Landsberg. Subtitled "The Magazine of Science Fiction Discoveries", the cleverly titled Unearth had the avowed intention that all fiction should be by previously unpublished authors or by authors previously published only in Unearth, or be reprints of first-sf-story sales by well known ...
Vedeler, Harold Torger
(? - ) US teacher and author whose romance-infused sf novel, Intersect: a Love Story (2003), describes a Videogame that operates Virtual Reality-like directly on the minds of participants, primarily women. A World Championship intersection between the two protagonists causes emotional turmoil. [JC]
Stella
Alleged early sf magazine in Sweden, described as follows by Sam J Lundwall in the Scandinavia entry in the second edition of this encyclopedia: "There was an early attempt at a Swedish sf magazine, Stella – four irregular issues April 1886-August 1888, with short stories by [...] foreign authors and a scattering of anonymous material that may have been by local hands – but it was much before its time 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 ...