SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Friday 24 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 24 January 2025
Sponsor of the day: Joe Haldeman
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 ...
John Carter: Warlord of Mars
Board and counter Wargame (1979). Simulations Publications Inc. Designed by Mark Herman, Eric Goldberg. / While most easily classified as a Wargame, John Carter is actually a fusion of several types of game which have followed generally separate paths of development since its release. Specifically, it combines many of the attributes of Board Games, Wargames and ...
Bensen, D R
(1927-1997) US editor and author, his novels being usually pseudonymous. The two anthologies he has edited, The Unknown: 11 Stories (anth 1963) and The Unknown Five (anth 1964), are both fantasy and (all but one story) compiled from Unknown. He was more important within the sf field for his editorship of Pyramid Books 1957-1967, a period during which that firm became a significant producer of sf novels in ...
Lankford, J R
(? - ) US author whose first novel, The Crowning Circle (2001) was a thriller and whose second, The Jesus Thief (2003), depicts an attempt to Clone a second Jesus or Christ from DNA found in blood in the Shroud of Turin. As the outcome is uncertain, so is the tale's generic nature. [JC]
Martine, Arkady
Pseudonym of US academic and author AnnaLinden Weller (1985- ) whose doctoral dissertation, "Imagining Pre-Modern Empire: The Letters of Byzantine Imperial Agents Outside the Metropole" (successfully submitted and available 2014), clearly informs her fiction, as does Armenian-Byzantine Frontier: The Cultural Politics of Empire in the Medieval World (2018). She began publishing work of genre interest with "Lace Downstairs" in Abyss and Apex for the 4th ...
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 ...