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 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 ...
Manuel, Frank E
(1910-2003) US academic and author, married to his collaborator Fritzie P Manuel from 1931 until his death. Some of his early work – like the various articles later assembled as The Politics of Modern Spain (1938), contain prescient analyses of the consequences of the Spanish Civil War. He was a prolific historical scholar, though it is his magnum opus, Utopian Thought in the Western World (1979) with Fritzie P ...
Brackett, Leigh
(1915-1978) US scriptwriter and author, for most of her career deeply involved in the writing of fantasy and sf, for which she perhaps remains best known, though her detective novels and her 16 film and television scenarios have been justly praised. Her film work includes screenplays for The Vampire's Ghost (1945) and The Long Goodbye (1973); and for Howard Hawks's The Big Sleep (1946) and Rio Bravo (1958), novelizing her own script as ...
Holland, Cecelia
(1943- ) US author whose numerous historical novels, beginning with The Firedrake (1966), have explored with striking vividness many of the genuine "alternate worlds" on Earth through the radically unmundane form of the historical novel. One of these, still-born as a tale set in Mongol China, became the sf novel Floating Worlds (1976), a formidably long and complex Space Opera involving conflict in the Solar ...
Hornig, Charles D
(1916-1999) US editor whose career began in September 1933 when, as a young sf fan, he started a Fanzine called The Fantasy Fan: The Fans' Own Magazine (see Amateur Magazine), and happened to send a copy of it to Hugo Gernsback. By coincidence, Gernsback was at that time looking for a new managing editor for Wonder Stories, and was so impressed by ...
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 ...