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Tuesday 21 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 ...
Ballard, Isaac Fowler
(1826-1897) UK tax officer ("supervisor of excise") and author of The Prophetic Future of the Empire of Great Britain: Dedicated to her Royal and Imperial Majesty the Queen (1871 chap), in which the Battle of Dorking scenario is taken to predict a Future History in which Britain triumphs. [JC]
Knight, Norman L
(1895-1972) US author and pesticide chemist for the Department of Agriculture until his retirement in 1963. He was not a prolific writer, publishing only 11 stories altogether, the first of which was the serialized novella "Frontier of the Unknown" for Astounding in July and August 1937. He made his main contribution by collaborating with James Blish on A Torrent of Faces (1967). This novel – whose ...
Sackville-West, V
(1892-1962) UK author, married to Harold Nicolson and renowned for her creation of the garden at Sissinghurst, Kent; she was christened Victoria, but was almost always called Vita, to avoid confusion with her mother, also Victoria. A member of the Bloomsbury Group and a model for the title character of Virginia Woolf's Orlando (1928), she was best known for non-genre novels like The Edwardians ...
Nearing, H, Jr
Working name of Homer C Nearing Jr (1915-2003), US author and professor of English at Pennsylvania Military College, married to Alice Eleanor Jones. His series of fourteen stories about Professor Cleanth Penn Ransom and Professor Archibald MacTate, mathematician and philosopher respectively, appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, beginning with "The Poetry Machine" in Fall 1950 (see ...
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 ...