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 ...
Sagas, L M
(? - ) US author of the slightly spoofish Ambit's Run Space Opera sequence beginning with Cascade Failure (2024). The interstellar Space Opera setting, in which a for-profit corporation vies with a vast union, both under the aegis of a monitoring Guild, provides opportunities for action in space and on planets. An AI-governed ...
Children's SF
For there to exist a term designating a category of fiction written for children, it was necessary to invent a category of human designated as children. "In medieval society, the idea [more properly "feeling"] of childhood did not exist", Philippe Ariès (1914-1984) claimed in L'Enfant et la Vie Familiale sous l'Ancien Régime (1960; trans Robert Baldick as Centuries of Childhood 1962). Although this famous over-bald assertion was soon challenged, it ...
Sirota, Mike
(1946- ) US author, beginning with the Reglathium sequence of Planetary Romances, the first listed being The Prisoner of Reglathium (1978), but with all five volumes published simultaneously, and featuring various adventures across romantic continents: Monsters are encountered, and Underground vistas gape open, but the sequence lacks the narrative ...
Grossman, Leigh
(? - ) US editor and author, who also writes as Leigh Ronald Grossman; perhaps best known for his sf Anthology, Sense of Wonder (anth 2011), which in its nearly 1,000 dense pages includes at least 200 sf stories with commentaries. His novels, including the Cards of Fate series beginning with The Green Lion (2007), and The Lost Daughters (2018), which is a singleton, are ...
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 ...