SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Sunday 19 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 17 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 ...
Play by Email
Term used to describe a game in which the players communicate by electronic means, but not in real time. Thus, all messages sent in a Play By Email game are subject to delays resembling those imposed by a physical postal system. For convenience, this encyclopedia uses the term to cover any electronic form of communication, including email and entering information on a website, whether handled manually by the player or automatically by the game software. In essence, Play By Email is identical to ...
Higginson, S J
(? -? ) US author of a Lost Race novel, A Princess of Java: A Tale of the Far East (1887; vt Java: The Pearl of the East 2007), the race in question found in the interior of the eponymous Island. [JC]
Elphinstone, Margaret
(1948- ) UK poet and author, longtime resident in Scotland, author of at least two gardening books and other works, who began publishing work of sf interest with "Spinning the Green" in Despatches from the Frontiers of the Female Mind (anth 1985) edited by Jen Green and Sarah Lefanu; several other stories, all assembled in An Apple from a Tree and Other Visions (coll 1991), involve the testing but strangely ...
Truman Show, The
Film (1998). Paramount Pictures presents a Scott Rudin production. Directed by Peter Weir. Written by Andrew Niccol. Cast includes Jim Carrey, Noah Emmerich, Ed Harris, Laura Linney and Natascha McElhone. 103 minutes. Colour. / Truman Burbank (Carrey) discovers that his entire life has been lived in a 24/7 reality television show, and that his idyllic Florida community is a vast enclosed soundstage in which everyone else is an actor. / Niccol's ...
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 ...