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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 ...
McCarthy, Cormac
(1933-2023) US playwright and author whose most highly esteemed and best-known novels until the twenty-first century were technically Westerns, including Blood Meridian; Or the Evening Redness in the West (1985), a scarifying recounting of events subsequent to the Mexican-American War of 1846-1848 seen through the eyes of a runaway fourteen-year-old lad. The slow intensification of horrors, many of them historically documented, comes close to ...
Cryonics
A term coined in the 1960s by Karl Werner, referring to techniques for preserving the human body by supercooling. R C W Ettinger's The Prospect of Immortality (1964) popularized the idea that the corpses of terminally ill people might be "frozen down" in order to preserve them until such a time as medical science would discover cures for all ills and a method of resurrecting the dead. Many sf stories have extrapolated the notion. / The ...
Linklater, Eric
(1899-1974) Scottish author and playwright, in active service (underage) during World War One, an experience which, he stated twenty years after its close, transformed him from a "patriot" into a thinking man. He was proficient in various genres though he is best remembered for his novels, beginning with White Maa's Saga (1929), the best-known of these being Juan in America (1931), a picaresque Satire on ...
Gold, Alan
(1945-2024) UK journalist and author, in Australia from 1970, active from 1975 onward. Most of his novels are historical thrillers; he is of sf interest for Bat out of Hell: An Eco-Thriller (2015), a tale of global Pandemic whose mutant virus, spread by bats, is one hundred per cent fatal. As panic grows the only countermeasure seems to be wholesale extermination of bats, a policy violently opposed by animal rights activists who duly become ...
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 ...