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 24 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 ...
Chan, Jessamine
(? - ) US editor and author whose first novel, set in a very Near Future Dystopian America, anguishingly traces a mother's potential loss of her child through her effective criminalization in this vision of a land dominated by fundamentalist Religion. Her only recourse seems to be to undergo forced Cultural Engineering ...
Conviser, Josh
(1974- ) Working name of US screenwriter and author whose Ryan Laing sequence of Near Future thrillers, comprising Echelon (2006) and EMPYRE (2007), posits a world in which contemporary intelligence surveillance has become hugely more sophisticated (capable in effect of not only gathering data but interpreting it). In the first volume, the Cyborg protagonist is instrumental in ...
Tower Comics
The Comics imprint of Tower Books, active from 1965 to 1969, originally edited by Wally Wood. Wood found himself unable to handle the workload alone and brought in veteran comics writer Samm Schwartz (1920-1997) to help with all titles except his own. Wood had been promised a great deal of creative control and a large budget for the line, which included teen titles, war comics, and Superhero titles. It ...
Radon
Film (1956; vt Sora no Daikaijū Radon ["Giant Monster of the Sky, Radon"]; vt, outside Japan, Rodan). Toho. Directed by Ishirō Honda. Written by Takeshi Kimura and Takeo Murata, based on a story by Takashi Kuronomura. Cast includes Akihiko Hirata, Kenji Sahara and Yumi Shirkawa. 79 minutes. Colour. / This film, the first Japanese Kaiju Monster Movie in colour, is from the same team that produced ...
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 ...