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 ...
Iced Earth
US metal band formed in Tampa, Florida in 1984, led by guitarist and songwriter Jon Schaffer (1968- ). Their Something Wicked Saga, comprising three albums, has nothing to do with Ray Bradbury, but does form an overarching sf concept about a race called the Setians who were the original inhabitants of Earth, directly descended from the creator of the universe. Humanity arrives on Earth seeking the secret of the Setians' knowledge ...
Allbeury, Ted
Working name of UK crime/spy-fiction author Theodore Edward le Bouthillier Allbeury (1917-2005), much of whose fiction takes its authentic tone from the fact that he was in the British secret service during World War Two; he also wrote as Richard Butler and as Patrick Kelly. Some of his spy thrillers edge into Near Future venues, though his only sf novel proper is All Our Tomorrows (1982), which depicts a UK occupied by Russia after it has declined ...
Dead Kids
Film (1981; vt Strange Behavior). Endeavour/Bannon Glenn/Hemdale. Directed by Michael Laughlin. Written by Laughlin, William Condon. Cast includes Arthur Dignam, Louise Fletcher, Fiona Lewis, Michael Murphy and Dan Shor. 99 minutes, cut to 93 minutes. Colour. / This Australian/New Zealand exploitation sf/Horror movie is set in the US Midwest and has a largely US cast, but was actually shot in New Zealand. It is the first of a projected trilogy ...
Fezandié, Clement
(1865-1959) US businessman, playwright and author based circa 1886-1919 in New York, though he lived and travelled in the Middle East in later life, and died in Belgium. Of his earlier work, The Revenge: A Tragedy in Three Acts (1895 chap) with Rodolphe De L'Escale involves a ghost; and The Sturgis Wager: A Detective Story (1899) as by Edgar Morette features a murderer who dissolves his victims in an sf-like fluid. His sf novel proper, Through the Earth ...
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 ...