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Thursday 23 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 ...
Andromeda Strain, The
Film (1971). Universal. Directed by Robert Wise. Written by Nelson Gidding, based on The Andromeda Strain (1969) by Michael Crichton. Cast includes Arthur Hill, James Olson, Kate Reid and David Wayne. 130 minutes. Colour. / This film, whose director had in 1951 made the classic sf film The Day the Earth Stood Still, concerns a microscopic ...
Robinson Crusoe on Mars
Film (1964). Schenck-Zabel/Paramount. Directed by Byron Haskin. Written by Ib Melchior, John C Higgins, remotely based on Robinson Crusoe (1719) by Daniel Defoe. Cast includes Vic Lundin and Paul Mantee. 109 minutes. Colour. / Haskin directed several sf films in the 1950s, including War of the Worlds (1953), and returned to the ...
Riley, Brett
(1970- ) US teacher and author whose first novel Comanche (2020), is a Western involving the century-old ghost of a gunslinger. His sf tale, Lord of Order (2021), set in a post-Technology Ruined Earth version of a balkanized America, confronts the "Lord of Order" of New Orleans with a crisis of survival. [JC]
Van Gennep, Arnold
(1873-1957) Dutch-German anthropologist, sociologist and author, in France from early manhood; he is best known for Les Rites de Passage [for subtitle see Checklist below] (1909; trans Gabrielle L Caffe and Monika B Vizedom as The Rites of Passage 1960), whose breakdown of ceremonies of transition into three phases – separation, liminality and incorporation – has influenced authors of fiction for over a century. Van Gennep is some direct sf interest for ...
Robinson, Roger
(1943- ) UK computer programmer, bibliographer and publisher, active in UK Fandom for many years. The Writings of Henry Kenneth Bulmer (1983 chap; rev 1984 chap) is an exhaustive Bibliography of one of the most prolific sf writers, Kenneth Bulmer, and Who's Hugh?: An SF Reader's Guide to Pseudonyms (1987) is similarly exhaustive in its ...