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
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 ...
Turner, George
(1916-1997) Australian sf critic and author, whose connection with sf came quite late in life, long after the publication 1959-1967 of his first five novels, all of them mainstream; they were eventually followed by Transit of Cassidy (1978), also nonfantastic. He became well known for somewhat stern sf criticism in the 1970s, published in SF Commentary, Foundation and elsewhere, and ...
Linton, Dr C E
(1865-1930) US author of The Earthomotor and Other Stories (coll of linked stories 1920), a series of tales involving Transportation with the aid of various Inventions including the eponymous burrower, which carries the cast into a Hollow Earth where a Lost World is discovered whose inhabitants enjoy Immortality; and a ...
Williams, Carol Lynch
(1959- ) US author of some interest for the Just in Time series of very Young Adult Time Travel tales beginning with The Rescue Begins in Delaware (2013), all with Cheri Pray Earl; the two child protagonists travel back and forth in a Time Machine coveted by a Villain, and meet various historical figures, including Thomas Alva ...
Science Fiction Book Club
We use the term book club in its older sense, that of a subscription-based relationship between purchasers – who normally agree to buy a certain number of titles a year – and the organization which publishes or distributes these titles, usually at a very significant discount from the retail price in bookshops. More recently the term has been applied to a discussion club, usually informal, where a group of people gather regularly to discuss a previously decided book. This sense of ...
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 ...