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
Sponsor of the day: Joe Haldeman
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 ...
Bibliographies
For students of science fiction, here luckily distinguished from students of what were once called non-genre literatures, bibliography is the second arm of criticism. Science fiction bibliography encompasses both description (physical description of the books of a single author or press) and context (what was published, in what significant form, when, and where). Compiling checklists and bibliographies was initially and has to a surprising extent remained a labour of love, very often carried ...
Nolan, Christopher
(1970- ) Anglo-American filmmaker (with dual citizenship) known for his audacious experiments in film narrative form, as well as for his more conventionally shaped but thematically ambitious work on Warner's revived Batman franchise. A director, producer, and screenwriter, he often works in tandem with his wife Emma Thomas (1971- ), his screenwriter brother Jonathan Nolan (1976- ), the film composer ...
Farmer, Richard N
(1928-1987) US academic – Professor in the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University – and author of Islandia Revisited (1983), a Sequel by Other Hands to Austin Tappan Wright's Islandia (1942); the visit to Islandia takes place during World War Two. [JC]
Lessing, Doris
(1919-2013) Persian- (Iranian-) born author, in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) 1925-1949, in UK subsequently. Her long career – which eventually earned her the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2007 – can be roughly divided into two broad periods. She began publishing stories in 1948, and from that date until the end of the 1960s she was best known for searching mimetic novels which acutely anatomized a range of topics, from the post-colonial role of ...
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 ...