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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
Sponsor of the day: Joe Haldeman
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 ...
Alternate Reality Game
Term used to describe a type of Videogame which shares much with the fictional Godgames described in such works as Robert Shea's and Robert Anton Wilson's Illuminatus! trilogy and Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 (1966). There is a notable resemblance between many examples of the form and the (perhaps ...
El Hazard The Magnificent World
Japanese Original Video Animation (OVA) (1995-1996). Original title Shinpi no Sekai Eru Hazādo. AIC, Pioneer LDC. Directed by Hiroki Hayashi. Written by Ryoe Tsukimura. Voice cast includes Yuri Amano, Kouji Ishii, Tomoko Ishimura, Tetsuya Iwanaga, Rio Natsuki, Ryotaro Okiayu, Ryūzaburō Ōtomo, Tomo Sakurai and Yoko Sawami. Seven 30-45 minute episodes. Colour. / Makoto Mizuhara (Iwanaga) accidentally activates an artefact found ...
Robinson, Charles Henry
(1843-1940) US author who served in that country's civil war and later as a member of the Iowa legislature. His novel Longhead: The Story of the First Fire (1913) capably runs the gamut of Prehistoric SF themes from the discovery of fire to the first hints of civilization (see Origin of Man). [JC]
Frewer, Ellen Elizabeth
(1848-1940) UK author and translator, active before the end of the nineteenth century; her translations of Jules Verne were fuller and less tampered-with than most other versions of Verne during the years she worked on his books. It has been suggested that her financial independence allowed her to be firm on maintaining the integrity of her work. Frewer's later life seems to have been lived in private. [JC]
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 ...