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
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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 ...
White, Leslie T
(1903-1967) Canadian-born US screenwriter and author, initially a police detective in Los Angeles, an experience he used in his detective novels. Of the films in which he was involved, The Man They Could Not Hang (1939), for which he wrote the story, features a Mad Scientist who is resurrected – according to his instructions – after being hanged. Of his novels, 5,000 Trojan Horses ...
Androids
The term "android", which means "manlike", was initially used of Automata, and the form "androides" first appeared in English in 1727 in reference to supposed attempts by the alchemist Albertus Magnus (circa 1200-1280) to create an artificial man; but something like androids long precede their being called androids. Treating Caliban as android-like may over-egg Prospero's Godgame control over his creatures in William ...
Singer, Judith
(? - ) US author of Threshold (1975), a Science Fantasy tale which traces the quest of three separate protagonists, one of them a Cyborg, across the eponymous threshold into an Inner Space confrontation. [JC]
Ryan, Thomas
(? -? ) UK author of Men in Chains (coll of linked stories 1938) comprising a series of tales designed to describe the Evolution of Homo sapiens in Scientific Romance language, beginning in prehistory (see Prehistoric SF) and moving to the Near Future. The title conveys Ryan's sense of the costs of ...
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 ...