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
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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 ...
Horler, Sydney
(1888-1954) UK journalist – active from about 1905 – and author, most of whose 150 novels are thrillers, all of them published between 1916 and 1955. Some of these tales incorporate sf elements in the form of fantastic Inventions and/or McGuffins, as for instance in the early Curse of Doone (1928), in which a German spy impersonates a vampire who might in fact exist, while simultaneously an sf ...
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 ...
Harris, Rosemary
(1923-2019) UK writer who concentrated in her early career on non-fantastic novels for adults, beginning with The Summer-House (1956), but began to publish work of genre interest with "Hamlin" for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in September 1961. Much of her later work for Young Adult readers has been fantasy, beginning with the Reuben sequence comprising The Moon in the Cloud (1968), ...
Bennett, Ron
(1933-2006) UK Fanzine editor, author and book dealer – for many years a stalwart of UK Convention dealers' rooms – whose 1950s fanzine was Ploy (13 issues 1954-1959, numbered #2 to #14) and who from 1959 to 1971 edited and published Skyrack (which see), the British Newszine of the 1960s, all issues of which were eventually assembled with related material as ...
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 ...