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 ...
Beastars
Japanese animated tv series (2019-current). Based on the Manga by Paru Itagaki. Orange. Directed by Shinichi Matsumi. Written by Nanami Higuchi. Voice cast includes Chikahiro Kobayashi, Yūki Ono and Sayaka Senbongi. 24 23-minute episodes. Colour. / Beastar's world is much like ours (see Alternate History), but its civilization consists of anthropomorphized animals and birds (whose ...
Hayward, Dana
Pseudonym of US psychologist and author Mark Muse (? - ), active since the early 1980s, whose works under his real name are nonfiction. As Hayward, he is the author of a Near Future Dystopian sf novel, Entropy (2022), set in a world ravaged by Climate Change, Pandemic and Wars. The ...
Waidner, Isabel
(1974- ) German-born academic, editor, journalist and author, in UK from 1995. Their first book of fiction, the novel Gaudy Bauble (2017), surreally fantasticates a pantomimic London which it would be inadvisable to call Near-Future, but which, as with the rest of their fiction, seems akin to the near future. Sterling Karat Gold (2021) is partly set in a fabulated Camden Town. ...
Numa Shōzō
Pseudonym of a controversial Japanese author, whose identity was never confirmed, but believed by many, including the National Library of Japan, to be a pen-name for Tetsuo Amano (1926-2008), an editor at the Shinchōsha publishing house. Amano once admitted to being Numa, but later retracted his confession. Other candidates, largely discounted, have included the authors Tatsuhiko Shibusawa and Ryūichi Tamura, as well as Yukio ...
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 ...