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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
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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 ...
Hillgarth, Alan
(1899-1978) UK soldier, intelligence officer – rising in that capacity to Chief of British Naval Intelligence, Eastern Theatre – and author, whose fifth novel, The Black Mountain (1933), is a Near Future tale of revolution and politics in Bolivia, with a Lost Race element conveyed through the charismatic young protagonist's mysterious teacher, perhaps a Secret Master ...
Heroclix
Miniature models based Wargame (2002). WizKids. Designed by Jordan Weisman, Seth Johnson. / HeroClix is a Collectible Miniatures Game based on Superhero Comics. Players purchase prepainted figures and then assemble teams with which to act out superpowered battles on printed maps. The figures are ingeniously designed, using a dial in the base ...
Ryner, Han
Pseudonym of Algerian-born French philosopher and author Jacques Élie Henri Ambroise Ner (1861-1938), which he adopted in 1898, after having published fairly widely under his own name. His philosophical position, as articulated in many articles and books, combined epicurean stoicism about the purpose of life with anarchist political views which led to his taking a pacifist stand in World War One, a position reflected in Les Pacifiques ["The ...
O'Rourke, Frank
(1916-1989) US author whose most popular books were Westerns; he published over sixty works of fiction, and more than 100 stories during the 1940s and 1950s in Collier's and other slick magazines. One mystery novel appeared as by Frank O'Malley. His sole sf novel, Instant Gold (1964), is an amusing Satire in which a small and convivial cabal rocks the boat of American ...
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 ...