SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 21 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 ...
Cook, Robin
Working name of UK author Robert William Arthur Cook (1931-1994), resident for some years in France (in order, he intimated, to put distance between himself and gangland acquaintances), where he became well-known for noir thrillers written as by Derek Raymond, taking that name perhaps because other Robin Cooks – the author Robin Cook, see entry below, and the British politician Robin Cook (1946-2005) – had effectively taken over his name; he ...
Le Queux, William
(1864-1927) UK journalist and author (his father was French), active contributor to newspapers from the mid-1880s, and author of over 200 books in a variety of genres. Most of his most popular works were espionage thrillers in the vein of E Phillips Oppenheim – a notorious confabulator, Le Queux claimed, unconvincingly, to be a spy himself – and detective novels, often with oriental colouring, beginning with Guilty Bonds (1890), ...
Blaylock, James P
(1950- ) US author, born and based in California, whose first published sf was "Red Planet" for Unearth #3 in Summer 1977, and whose "The Ape-Box Affair" (April 1978 Unearth) (see Apes as Human) may be the first consciously Steampunk tale; his first books were two fantasies in his Elfin series, The Elfin Ship (1982; original ...
Ballard, J G
(1930-2009) UK author, born in Shanghai and as a child interned in a Japanese civilian POW camp during World War Two. He first came to the UK in December 1945, and read medicine at King's College, Cambridge, but left without taking a degree. He began publishing sf with simultaneous stories in each of E J Carnell's two sf magazines: "Escapement" for New Worlds and "Prima Belladonna" for ...
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 ...