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Wednesday 22 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 ...
Stang, Rev Ivan
Pseudonym of US film-maker, cultural critic, hoaxer, and author Douglas St Clair Smith (1953- ), taking the title "Reverend" from the Church of the SubGenius – an elaborately nonsensical spoof Religion he claimed not to have founded by himself. He edited The Book of the SubGenius (anth 1983), a Satire on other religions and cults in the form of densely packed clip art and surreal text relating the ...
King Crimson
UK group formed by and most associated with Robert Fripp. The band's first album In the Court of the Crimson King (1969) starts with the lengthy, hammerblow track "21st Century Schizoid Man" in which a vision of future Dystopian alienation is conveyed via choppy distorted vocals and a thunderous, repeating riff. The remainder of the album, and particularly the title track, is more Fantasy ...
Hendrix, Howard V
(1959- ) US academic and author who began publishing work of genre interest with "In the Smoke" (in L Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future Vol 2, anth 1986, ed Algis Budrys); other early work was assembled in Testing, Testing, 1, 2, 3 (coll 1990 chap). After an academic study of medieval and Renaissance texts that invoke visions of last things, ...
Reade, Philip
A probable pseudonym of an unidentified US author (? -? ); used for dime novels (see Dime-Novel SF) in Street & Smith's Good News and The Nugget Library in competition to Tousey's Frank Reade, Jr. stories (see Frank Reade Library); he is not to be confused with the author Philip Hildreth Reade (1844-1919). Reade wrote nine ...
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 ...