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 24 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 ...
Mezrich, Ben
(1969- ) US broadcaster and author who remains best known for nonfiction books like Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six MIT Students Who Took Vegas for Millions (2002), a narrative whose dramatic licence inspired accusations that it was fiction, and The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook, A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius, and Betrayal (2009); he also writes as by Holden Scott. Of sf interest are several medical thrillers ...
Mysterious Island, The
US film (1929). Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Directed by Benjamin Christensen, Lucien Hubbard and Maurice Tourneur; underwater sequences directed by J Ernest Williamson. Written by Lucien Hubbard, loosely based on the works of Jules Verne. Cast includes Lionel Barrymore, Jacqueline Gadsden, Lloyd Hughes and Montagu Love. 95 minutes. Originally predominantly two-colour Technicolor, but apparently only black and white copies survive [see American Film Institute ...
Miéville, China
(1972- ) UK author most of whose early work can be understood in terms of Dark Fantasy [see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below] or horror (see Horror in SF), but who has become a central figure in early twenty-first-century Fantastika. Beginning with his first novel, King Rat (1998), his narratives constantly feed upon ...
Purtill, Richard
(1931-2016) US academic and author whose first work of genre interest was the nonfiction study Lord of Elves and Eldils: Fantasy and Philosophy in C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien (1974); separate examinations of these two authors from a Christian standpoint followed [see Checklist below]. Purtill's Kaphtu Universe sequence, beginning with The Golden Gryphon Feather (1979) and extending to two trilogies, is fantasy inspired by archaeology and the myths of ancient ...
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 ...