SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Monday 20 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 17 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 ...
Fox, Mary
(1798-1864) UK author, an illegitimate daughter of King William IV (1765-1837); Richard Whately (1787-1863), the Archbishop of Dublin, may have written most of the Proto SF novel initially attributed mainly to her. Account of an Expedition (Planned and Conducted by Mr H Sibthorpe) to the Interior of New Holland (1837; rev vt The Southlanders: An Account of an Expedition to the Interior of New Holland 1860), neither edition credited on ...
Goodchild, George
(1888-1969) UK thriller and adventure author and playwright. His first sf novel, The Eye of Abu (1927) as by Alan Dare, was an Atlantean (see Atlantis) Lost-World novel relating the discovery of the Fountain of Youth. As Goodchild he followed this with The Monster of Grammont (1927), marginally sf; The Emperor of Hallelujah Island (1930), about a kingdom of criminals; ...
Downing, Paula E
Working name of US attorney, municipal judge and author Paula Elaine Downing King (1951-2017), who wrote also as Paula King and under the pseudonyms P K McAllister and Diana Marcellas; she was formerly married to and divorced from T Jackson King. Downing began publishing work of genre interest with "Loni's Promise" for Discoveries in 1989. Her first novel, Mad Roy's Light (1990) as Paula King, is an sf adventure featuring a human woman who ...
Lambert, Verity
(1935-2007) UK Television producer who, as the first in that role (1963-1965) for Doctor Who (1963-current), had an immense influence on the show's shape and themes, which has lasted to the present day. At the time Lambert was the only female drama producer – and the youngest – at the BBC; she was appointed by the Head of Drama, Sydney Newman, who had developed the series (along with Donald Wilson and C E Webber). ...
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 ...