SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Saturday 18 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 17 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 ...
Crack in the World
Film (1965). Security Pictures/Paramount. Directed by Andrew Marton. Written by Jon Manchip White, Julian Halevy. Cast includes Dana Andrews, Alexander Knox, Kieron Moore and Janette Scott. 96 minutes. Colour. / An attempt to use a nuclear device to tap geothermal energy from deep within the Earth causes a large and ever increasing crack in the crust. A bid to halt the process with a further nuclear explosion sends into space a large chunk of the ...
Ingalls, Rachel
(1940-2019) US-born author, in the UK from 1965, most of whose work balances in edgy Equipoise between sharp social comedy and Fabulation or Fantasy [see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below]. At least two of her short novels are of sf interest: Theft (1970 chap; exp as coll, vt ...
Zone
Within the fictional worlds of sf stories or novels, whenever a space of some unusual properties is found, it can be defined as the zone. A zone's most characteristic feature is the way it differs from and interacts with the world around it. Sf most frequently depicts realities dissimilar to or even distant from that of readers' empirical experience, but no matter how surprising they seem, they are customarily based on a set of irrefutable yet decodable rules to be concretized in the course of ...
Farnsworth, Christopher
(1971- ) US screenwriter and author who came to wide notice with the President's Vampire sequence beginning with Blood Oath (2010), which features episodes from the life and work of Nathaniel Cade, a Vampire who, on being captured in 1867, is pardoned by President Ulysses S Grant on condition that he swear to use his powers on behalf of American Presidents from that time onward. The first tale deals with his more or less ...
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 ...