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 ...
Curties, Henry
(1860-1928) UK author, who sometimes wrote as Captain Henry Curties; his first sf novel, Tears of Angels (1907), features its protagonist's conveyance to Alpha Centauri on an angel, who is perhaps weeping; from the star he gains a perspective on Earth, then returns home to find himself in an Alternate-History version of the future. Out of the Shadows (1908) is a detection with occult elements; When England Slept ...
Galactic Cowboys
US rock group who have returned repeatedly to sf themes in their music, often evoking motifs and venues found in sf Westerns. Their 1991 eponymous debut crashes and bashes through songs that use the Moon landing, including audio samples of Neil Armstrong, as a point of reference: particularly "Pump Up The Space Suit" and the ironically titled (given its raucously insistent heavy metal style) "Sea of Tranquillity". "Ranch on Mars" ...
Brinsmade, Herman Hine
(1876-1968) US author whose Utopia, Utopia Achieved: A Novel of the Future (1912), depicts a vastly enlarged Near Future New York full of mechanical and cultural marvels, a self-regulating obedient workforce, and free health care. Brinsmade's romantic vew of twentieth-century Transportation – monorails, vast aerial structures that resemble Albert ...
Covina, Gina
(1952- ) US author on various topics, including Ecology issues, and author of a Near Future Disaster novel, The City of Hermits (1983), which is set in California after a great earthquake; there are hopes, subsequently, of a Utopian outcome. [JC]
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 ...