SF Encyclopedia Home Page
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 ...
Werber, Bernard
(1961- ) French author, most of whose work remains untranslated into English, though the first volume of his Les Fourmis ["The Ants"] sequence, Les Fourmis (1991; trans Margaret Rocques as Empire of the Ants 1996), gives some insight into a creative strategy he has followed subsequently. The admixture of Horror in SF topoi and philosophical discourse (conveyed in part through ample ...
Play by Mail
Term used to describe a game in which the players communicate by (physical) post. Typically all participants send their moves in at regular intervals to a central moderator, who processes the orders simultaneously and returns the results. The moderator is generally the only individual involved to know the current state of all the pieces belonging to every player. Sf examples include Starweb (1976) and ...
Beeton, Samuel Orchart
(1831-1877) UK publisher, editor and author, married from 1856 to Isabella Mary Mason (1836-1865), with whom he produced Beeton's Book of Household Management (1861), the book for which they remain best remembered. Beeton began his career as a publisher with Charles H Clarke in 1852, as C H Clarke & Co; at Beeton's instigation, they came out with the first English edition of Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) by Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896), which both brought the ...
Godwin, Tom
Working name of US author Thomas William Godwin (1915-1980), whose life and career were afflicted by disease and misfortune: family tragedies caused him to leave school after third grade, kyphosis misshaped his spine and truncated his military career, and he was an alcoholic. He published the first of approximately thirty sf stories, "The Gulf Between", in Astounding for October 1953, and soon after wrote his most famous and compelling tale, "The Cold Equations" (August ...
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 ...