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Sunday 26 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.
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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 ...
Hamilton, Donald
(1916-2006) Swedish-American author of many spy thrillers and several Westerns. Assignment: Murder (1956; vt Assassins Have Starry Eyes 1965) is of marginal sf interest in that its threatened protagonist is a nuclear research Scientist whose Project comes under attack. Hamilton is best known for the Matt Helm series of 27 spy thrillers (1960-1993, plus one still unpublished) beginning with ...
Kinross, Albert
(1870-1929) UK soldier, editor, journalist and author in various genres, of sf interest for The Fearsome Island: Being a Modern Rendering of the Narrative of one Silas Fordred, Master Mariner of Hythe, Whose Shipwreck and Subsequent Adventures Are Herein Set Forth, Also an Appendix Accounting in a Rational Manner for the Seeming Marvels that Silas Fordred Encountered During his Sojourn on the Fearsome Island of Don Diego Rodriguez (1896), the subtitle being explanatory. The ...
Wilson, Chris
(1949- ) UK psychologist and author most of whose novels work as a series of attempts to address issues of Identity through narratives featuring solitary Candide-like eccentrics exposed to – but not necessarily trapped by – the world at large. In Gallimauf's Gospel (1986), which is set on a remote Island in the nineteenth century, a monkey is washed ashore and mistaken for a Frenchman, even ...
Tobor the Great
Film (1954). Dudley Pictures Corporation. Produced by Richard Goldstone. Directed by Lee Sholem. Written by Philip MacDonald from a story by Carl Dudley. Tobor designed by Robert Kinoshita. Cast includes Karin Booth (Janice Roberts), Billy Chapin, Charles Drake, Steven Geray, Taylor Holmes and J Lewis Smith (uncredited). 77 minutes. Black and white. / The US government wants to attempt manned Space Flight, but Dr ...
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 ...