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Saturday 18 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 17 January 2025
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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 ...
Crace, Jim
Working name of UK journalist and author James Crace (1946- ), who began publishing fantasy with "Annie, California Plates" in The New Review for June 1974. His first novel, Continent (coll of linked stories 1986), is a Fabulation set on an imaginary southern continent in an otherwise present-day world; it won the Whitbread First Novel Prize, the Guardian Fiction Prize and the David Higham Prize. Crace's spare narrative ...
Beese, P J
(1946-2020) US author whose sf novel, The Guardsman (1988), with Todd Cameron Hamilton, is an unremarkable example of interstellar-empire adventure sf; its nomination for the 1989 Hugo caused some stir, and there was evidence of block voting. When made aware of this, the authors requested that their novel be withdrawn from the ballot. [JC]
House, Edward Mandell
(1858-1938) US political figure – in his refusal of official duties rather like an earlier Bernard Baruch (1870-1965) – involved with President Woodrow Wilson in setting up the League of Nations; his urgency about the USA's joining the League played some part in his dismissal in 1919 from Wilson's inner circle of advisors. Philip Dru, Administrator: A Story of Tomorrow, 1920-1935 (1912), published anonymously, is a surprisingly wide-ranging exercise in ...
Faulks, Sebastian
(1953- ) UK broadcaster, journalist and author, most of whose best-known fiction has been historical novels such as Birdsong (1993) and Charlotte Gray (1999), set respectively in the first and second world wars. He is of initial interest as an author of modestly gonzo Fantastika through the poems and stories assembled as Pistache (coll 2006) and Pistache Returns (coll 2016), each of ...
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 ...