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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.
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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 ...
Le Clézio, J M G
(1940- ) French author, born to Mauritian parents, and peripatetic for many years, his countries of residence including Nigeria, the UK and the USA; now primarily resident in France, America and Mauritius. Although he is known primarily for his work outside the sf field, much of his early work makes extensive use – though in an Absurdist and/or nouvelle roman mode – of sf tropes and topoi, beginning with ...
Juvenile Series
When dime novels (see Dime-Novel SF) declined and disappeared in the 1900s – partly because of public outcry against their supposed evil effect on boys, and partly because of increasing competition from the Pulp magazines, which had become comparable in price – the torch of juvenile sf was taken up by a new format, illustrated hardcover juvenile book series, and the ideas in these began to range more widely. The ...
Benjamin, Chloe
(? - ) US author whose first novel, The Anatomy of Dreams (2014), edges into the fantastic through its protagonists' obsessive quest to acquire lucid dreaming skills (see Virtual Reality), guided and perhaps deluded by a shamanic researcher. / The Immortalists (2018) similarly engages its four protagonists – who in 1969 have had their futures told by a psychic capable of actual ...
Found Footage
A term infelicitously but irreversibly appropriated since 1999 to denote fictional feature films, particularly in Horror genres, which emulate venerable epistolary and documentary modes of textuality by using elements of non-fiction film form and simulated amateur-video footage. (Previously the term had marked a class of documentary film distinguished by the incorporation of archive and amateur footage into an assembled feature with or without commentary, a ...
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 ...