SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Wednesday 22 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: Conversation 2023
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 ...
Tunstall, Brian
(1900-1970) UK author of several books on naval warfare; his sf novel, Eagles Restrained (1936), shows some prescience in his Prediction that World War Two will begin with a German-Polish conflict (though it dates the event to 1954), but is less fortunate in its assumption that the International Air Police of the League of Nations, maintaining a long-sustained Pax Aeronautica, ...
Hoskins, Robert
(1933-1993) US editor and author who began publishing sf with "Feet of Clay" for If in February 1958 as by Phillip Hoskins. He worked as a literary agent 1967-1968, and served as senior editor with Lancer Books 1969-1972, where he published the Infinity anthology sequence [see Checklist; see also Infinity] for which he was perhaps best known. Several other anthologies also appeared before he published his first novel, ...
Telepathy
Telepathy or mind-reading is the most popular and durable paranormal ability in sf; its hypothetical roots in scientific reality are discussed under ESP, as are instances of pre-Genre SF usage and various stories which deal with telepathy as part of a wider spectrum of Psi Powers. Roger Luckhurst's The Invention of Telepathy: 1870-1901 (2002) usefully ...
Turner, Alice K
(1939-2015) US editor and critic who from 1980 to 2000 served as fiction editor of Playboy, in which capacity her editorial skills were praised by Robert Silverberg; after her departure, Playboy's long-established hospitality to sf was much diminished. She edited two Anthologies of fiction from the magazine, of which The Playboy Book of Science Fiction (anth 1998) is a good ...
Robinson, Roger
(1943- ) UK computer programmer, bibliographer and publisher, active in UK Fandom for many years. The Writings of Henry Kenneth Bulmer (1983 chap; rev 1984 chap) is an exhaustive Bibliography of one of the most prolific sf writers, Kenneth Bulmer, and Who's Hugh?: An SF Reader's Guide to Pseudonyms (1987) is similarly exhaustive in its ...