SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Saturday 25 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 ...
Brown, Robin
(1937- ) UK author of a Near Future political tale, A Forest Is a Long Time Growing (1967), which is set in Africa, and of Megalodon (1981; vt Shark! 1983), in which a prehistoric shark, 200 feet long, is finally killed after much turmoil. [JC]
Gratacap, Louis Pope
(1851-1917) US naturalist, museum curator and author whose first writings were nonfiction essays like "The Ice Age" for the Popular Science Monthly in 1878. His first sf novel, The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars: Being the Posthumous Papers of Bradford Torrey Dodd (1903), remains his best known. Dying in the conviction that dead humans transcendentally ascend to a Martian Reincarnation as embodied spirits, the narrator's father is soon ...
Skaftun, Emily C
(? - ) US editor and author who began publishing work of genre interest with "My Only Sunshine" in Flub: A Webzine of Astonishing Tales for Fall-Winter 2009, assembled with a wide range of work as Living Forever & Other Terrible Ideas (coll 2020). As Tim Powers suggests in his introduction to the book, her very wide-ranging tales, many of them sf as Equipoised with ...
Garrett, George
(1929-2008) US academic, poet and author, most of his work being technically nonfantastic, though a career-long pattern of subjecting various genres (like the historical novel) to metafictional stresses sometimes hinted at a sustaining undertow of meaning compatible with Fantastika. The Magic Striptease (coll 1973) contains work of more explicit interest, though sf readings are problematical. He is of some sf interest for his collaboration with R H W ...
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 ...