SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Sunday 26 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 ...
McGhan, Barry
(1939- ) US fan and bibliographer who began to publish work of genre interest with "Andre Norton: Why Has She Been Neglected?" in Riverside Quarterly for January 1970. He is perhaps of greatest importance for the compilation Science Fiction and Fantasy Pseudonyms (1971 chap; var revs to 1979) [see Checklist below], a useful guide to Pseudonyms. ...
Blackden, Paul
(? - ) UK author of one sf novel, Adam and Eve 2020 A D (1974), set partly in Near Future Yorkshire, though both the destruction of London and New York are described; young Terry and Jackie survive into a very dangerous Post-Holocaust world but it looks as though they will make a go of it (see ...
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 ...
Enjoe Toh
(1972- ) Pen-name and preferred romanization of an unidentified Japanese author, a former physicist and postgraduate mathematician whose literary experiments have made him a liminal figure between Japan's sf community and the rarefied discourses of literary awards (see Postmodernism and SF). Such straddling of categories began with his debut works, of which his first published story was the surreal ...
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 ...