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 ...
Games Magazines
This encyclopedia does not as a rule give full entries to Games-oriented Print Magazines: FASA's Stardate (which see) is a rare exception, since for part of its run it was also a science fiction magazine; another exception is Ares (which see), most of whose issues included an sf story. Other games magazines of some relevance have included Dragon from TSR Inc, with 359 ...
Iczer One
Japanese Original Video Animation (OVA) (1985-1987). AIC. Based on the Manga by Aran Rei. Directed and written by Toshihiro Hirano. Voice cast includes Arisa Andō, Kaneto Shiozawa, Mayumi Shō, Keiko Toda, Naoko Watanabe and Yuriko Yamamoto. Three 30-48 minute episodes. Colour. / Having lost their homeworld, the Alien Cthulhu desire a new place to live, travelling the universe in their ...
Avatars
In the world of Computers, Cyberspace and Virtual Reality as these concepts already exist, avatars are familiar as the visible icons or points of presence in virtual space of either human beings or software routines. Well-known examples include the representations of player and non-player characters in Videogames, ...
Starcross
Videogame (1982). Infocom. Designed by Dave Lebling. Platforms: AppleII, Atari8, DOS, PCBoot (1982); C64 (1983); Mac (1984); AtariST (1985); Amiga (1986). / Starcross was one of the first text-based Adventure games to use an sf theme. The game's story is Hard SF, reminiscent of Arthur C Clarke's ...
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 ...