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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 24 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 ...
Westerman, Percy F
(1876-1959) UK author who specialized in adventure tales for boys, though his protagonists were usually vigorous adults, as befitted their military/adventurer roles; and very frequently set at sea. He was the father of John F C Westerman. Of Westerman's 170 or more volumes between 1908 and 1959, several are Children's SF, the most successful of these being perhaps the first: The Flying Submarine (1912), an ...
Ignotus Award
The annual Award, similar in scope to the Hugo, presented by the Spanish Fantasy, Science Fiction and Horror Association during the Spanish Fantasy, Science Fiction and Horror Convention known as HispaCon. These awards were established in 1991, and are named in honour of Coronel Ignotus, one of the pioneering sf authors in Spain (which see). The voting system consists of two phases: election of finalists and ...
Heydon, J K
(1884-1947) Australian businessman and author whose World D: A Brief Account of the Founding of Helioxenon (1935), as told to him by "Hal P. Trevarthen, Official Historian of the Superficies", describes the creation of an Under-the-Sea culture, Helioxenon; the detail is considerable, sometimes Catholic. On the jacket the novel is credited to Trevarthen. [JC]
Barbauld, Anna Laetitia
(1743-1825) UK educationist and author, important exponent of Unitarianism, whose stories for young children became famous. She is of Proto SF interest for Eighteen Hundred and Eleven: A Poem (1812 chap), which conveys in Gothic terms the vision of a Near Future Britain, some time after its defeat in the long war against Napoleonic France; the ruined country, including London itself (see ...
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 ...