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 ...
Onions, Oliver
(1873-1961) UK commercial artist, illustrator and author, active in various genres since 1899; married to Berta Ruck from 1909 until his death; he served in the Royal Engineers during World War One; in 1918 he legally changed his name to George Oliver but continued to write as Onions. He is best remembered for powerfully disturbing tales of ghosts and supernatural horrors, such as The Beckoning Fair One (in ...
Themerson, Stefan
(1910-1988) Polish-born film director, scriptwriter, photographer, publisher and author, active in Poland from 1928 as the author of at least ten children's books, and in the 1930s as a maker and producer of five experimental films. Almost all this work was executed in collaboration with his wife from 1931 and lifelong creative partner Franciszka Themerson (1907-1988), beginning with their founding of the Polish Filmmakers Cooperative. At least one of the films they produced is of sf interest: ...
Cole, Cyrus
(? -? ) US author. In his eccentrically interesting The Auroraphone: A Romance (1890), messages from a sentient being on Saturn are received on the eponymous instrument, an Invention designed to pick up "sound-signs" from almost anywhere; life on Saturn is Utopian in many ways, although a Robot revolt flares up – one of the first of many in sf, the most ...
Wernham, Mark
(? - ) UK journalist and author whose first novel, Martin Martin's on the Other Side (2008), is a Satire so gonzo and broad that it approaches slapstick Absurdist SF in its portrayal of the vaguely Near Future Britain, where the action unpacks. The protagonist Jensen Interceptor – hired by the government to track surviving acolytes of the late ...
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 ...