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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 ...
Carr, Robert Spencer
(1909-1994) US author, who began publishing work of sf interest as a teenager with "The Composite Brain" for Weird Tales in March 1925; his first novel, The Rampant Age (1928), which is not fantastic, was also precocious. He was the author of one fantasy novel filled with an erotic nostalgia for death, The Room Beyond (1948), and of Beyond Infinity (coll 1951), four warmly realized stories set on Earth in the ...
Women in SF
In "The Image of Women in Science Fiction" (November 1970 Red Clay Reader) Joanna Russ wrote, "There are plenty of images of women in science fiction. There are hardly any women." This apprehension of the state of affairs has changed in the subsequent decades, chiefly due to the impact of Feminism and to the increasing numbers of women writing sf in the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s and the new century, though also to an increased ...
Shaw, George Bernard
(1856-1950) Irish-born playwright, critic and author, in the UK from 1876, where he remained ferociously active throughout a writing career lasting almost seventy-five years (see Longevity in Writers); though often referred to as GBS, he increasingly wrote as Bernard Shaw. Under whatever form of his name, he was central to the Fabian Society from its founding in 1884, editing Fabian Essays (anth 1889) and beginning contentious intellectual ...
Henley, Carra Depuy
(1869-1905) US author of A Man from Mars (1901 chap), in which a Utopia on Mars is described, in terms involving some mysticism and some cod science regarding levitation. [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 ...