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 ...
Patterson, James
(1947- ) US author who has become a chart-dominating best-seller over the past three decades, his greatest success being the Alex Cross sequence of crime thrillers featuring a Black forensic psychologist, where the occasional apparent incursion into the fantastic – such as the vampire cult in Violets Are Blue (2001), and the infernal "Mastermind" whose powers fall short of the supernatural – is found to be an evil but nonfantastic device. ...
Liston, Edward
(1900-1986) UK-born physician, flight surgeon and author, naturalized as a US citizen in 1932; in his Lost Race novel, The Bowl of Night (1948), a flight surgeon crash-lands in the Mexican jungle, where he discovers a Mayan civilization accessible only through passages Underground; the Mayans, though totally out of touch with the outside world, have developed science and Technology to ...
Robinson, Frederick
(? -? ) US author of The War of the Worlds: A Tale of the Year 2,000 AD (1914), a privately printed tale E F Bleiler describes as "ludicrously bad", but which has been cited several times for its thematic material: Utopian advances in Transportation and Technology; rampant Imperialism ...
DuPrau, Jeanne
(1944- ) US author of Young Adult novels, those of specific sf interest being her City of Ember sequence – The City of Ember (2003), The People of Sparks (2004) and The Prophet of Yonwood (2006), all three assembled as The Books of Ember (omni 2008), plus The Diamond of Darkhold (2008) – set in a Ruined Earth two ...
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 ...