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Wednesday 22 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 ...
Stump, D L
(? -? ) US author whose sf novel, From World to World (1896; exp vt The Love of Meltha Laone; Or, Beyond the Sun 1913), describes a transit by Spaceship from Earth to Counter-Earth; various lessons are taken from this opposition of planets, focusing in particular on the advanced Utopia discovered on the latter. [JC]
Ran-Dells
US SF Music trio from southern New Jersey, consisting of three first cousins who all attended Brandeis University: Steven Rappaport (1943-2007), Robert Rappaport (1943- ) and John Spirt (1949-2003). They are remembered for their one sf novelty hit, "The Martian Hop" (1963) an original composition which made it to #16 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in September 1963. The cousins were inspired by the then-current popular trend in dances ...
Gender
Discussion regarding gender has largely focused on women: this encyclopedia has an entry for Women in SF but not one for men. This focus can be partly attributed to the drive of Feminism to explore emancipation from the oppression of men. There have been many Utopian depictions of one gender societies in which women thrive. Though authors also depict worlds in which men dominate, these are usually treated ...
Thomas, Frances
(1943- ) UK author most of whose fiction has been for the Young Adult market, usually fantasy, beginning with "In Flanders Fields" in The Fourteenth Armada Ghost Book (anth 1982) edited by Mary Danby. The young protagonist of Cityscape (1988) travels through a portal to a moderately Near Future Dystopia, a world where books are banned, and through her ...
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 ...