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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 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 ...
Markwick, Edward
Working name of UK lawyer and author Edward Markwick Johnson (1851-1925), later his legal name, active in the last quarter of the nineteenth century; his sf novel, The City of Gold: A Tale of Sport, Travel, and Adventure in the Heart of the Dark Continent (1896), direly invades H Rider Haggard territory, taking its protagonists into a scientifically advanced Semitic Lost World in Africa with ...
Allingham, Margery
(1904-1966) UK author, daughter of H J Allingham, active from her teens, when her first novel Blackerchief Dick (1923), an adventure set in the seventeenth century as conveyed through séances (see Club Story). She remains best known for the popular and long-running Albert Campion sequence of detective novels beginning with The Crime at Black Dudley (1929; vt The Black Dudley Murder ...
Wheldon, David
(1950- ) UK physician and author whose first novel, The Viaduct (1983), is typical of his work in general through its treatment of our Perceptions of reality as essentially indeterminable; for the released prisoner at the heart of this tale, the eponymous viaduct insecurely serves as a kind of threshold, perhaps into another Dimension. The Course of Instruction (1984) entangles its ...
Littell, Jonathan
(1967- ) US author, raised partly in France (he writes in French and English), resident mostly in Barcelona, Spain. His sf novel, Bad Voltage: A Fantasy in 4/4 (1989), depicts a Cyberpunk Paris with confused verve. The young protagonist (he is Black, though the cover of the first edition depicts him as white) moves from criminal activities Underground to the upper world of the rich, which mirrors ...
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 ...