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
Sponsor of the day: Joe Haldeman
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 ...
Naylor, Grant
Joint pseudonym of UK scriptwriters and authors Rob Grant (see his entry for solo works) and Doug Naylor (see his entry for solo title), who worked for three years as head writers for Spitting Image (1984-1996), a satirical television series using a combination of puppets and live action, and who wrote the Red Dwarf (1988-current) television series, which weds black humour and ...
Brown, Jerry Earl
(1940- ) US author in whose first sf novel, Under the City of Angels (1981), a sunken California is delved by the haunted protagonist, who finds powerful corporations and Aliens at the root of things. In Darkhold (1985), a man engages in a Godgame enterprise to Clone five lovers for himself in a kind of ...
Proctor, Frederick J
(? -? ) UK author of a Lost Race tale, The Secret of Mark Pepys (1899), set in the mountains of California, where Toltec descendants have created a secret civilization, with a queen. [JC]
Swearing
Genre SF authors often depict futuristic swearing, blasphemy and other forms of foul speech, not always with any great conviction. Robert Graves's Lars Porsena; Or, the Future of Swearing and Improper Language (1927 chap; exp vt The Future of Swearing and Improper Language 1936) foreshadows the problem afflicting the SF Magazines for decades after the year of his ...
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 ...