SF Encyclopedia Home Page
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 20 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 ...
Wright, Harold Bell
(1872-1944) US clergyman and enormously popular author whose only sf novel, The Devil's Highway (1932) with John Lebar, pseudonym of his son Gilbert Munger Wright (1901-1966), features a Mad Scientist and his culpable Scientist colleagues, whose Invention, a thought-control device operating with the help of a Power Source called "ethericity", suppresses ...
McCaughrean, Geraldine
(1951- ) UK editor and author, usually for children and for Young Adult readers, though occasionally for a wider readership; most of her work has been fantasy, beginning with A Little Lower Than the Angels (1987), where a young stonemason is seconded by God to serve as an apprentice angel. In A Pack of Lies: Twelve Stories in One (coll of linked stories 1988), a ...
de Gourmont, Remy
(1858-1915) French author, whose early work resembles that of Henri de Régnier, and in whose Une Nuite au Luxembourg (1906; trans Arthur Ransome as A Night in the Luxembourg 1912) a superior Alien, whose people occupy the Outer Planets, visits Earth briefly and engages in an illuminating conversation with some cultured humans. ...
Yano Ryūkei
Pen-name of Fumio Yano (1851-1931), a Japanese journalist, author and publisher regarded as one of the fathers of the genre in his native country. An early adopter of Western learning in the swiftly modernizing Japan, Yano studied English and Western law at Keiō Gijuku (later Keiō University). Following his graduation in 1873, he remained there as a teacher. In 1876, he became a journalist for the daily newspaper Yūbin Hōchi Shinbun ["Postal ...
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 ...