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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 24 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 ...
Didier de Chousy, Comte
(1834-1895) French nobleman and author of Ignis (1883 anonymous; rev 1884 as by Le Cte Didier de Chousy), an exorbitant Scientific Romance whose use of Hollow Earth topoi seems to have been drawn from Jules Verne's Voyage au centre de la Terre (1864; first trans as Journey to the Centre of the Earth 1867), but whose affinity to ...
Rayer, Francis G
(1921-1981) UK author and technical journalist (specializing in radio issues) who began publishing with Juggernaut (1944) for Link House Publications. His first sf novel was the unremarkable Realm of the Alien (1946 chap) as by Chester Delray, and his most notable was perhaps Tomorrow Sometimes Comes (1951), in which the general who has inadvertently caused a nuclear Holocaust awakens from ...
Bunch, David R
(1925-2000) US poet and author, whose longest paid employment was as a civilian cartographer for the US Air Force 1954-1973. It has been estimated – or claimed, apparently first by Judith Merril – that he published as many as 200 short stories before beginning to publish work of genre interest professionally with "Routine Emergency" for If in December 1957, though an earlier involvement with Fandom ...
Whiteley, Elizabeth
(? -? ) UK author of The Devil's Throne (1903), whose protagonists, transfixed by a lamia, invade the realm of the Devil, which is behind the Moon, travelling there in an aircraft-like Spaceship; in the vicinity of the Throne, they meet the dead souls of some famous humans. [JC]
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 ...