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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 ...
Gorgo
Film (1961). King Bros/MGM. Directed by Eugene Lourié. Written by John Loring, Daniel Hyatt, based on a story by Lourié and Hyatt. Cast includes William Sylvester, Bill Travers and Vincent Winter. 78 minutes. Colour. / A prehistoric reptile is captured off a small island in the Irish Sea, taken to London and put on show. But the 65ft (20m) creature turns out to be a mere infant, as everyone discovers when its 150ft (45m) ...
Woodard, George C
(1924-2001) US editor and author whose New Day, Big World, Few People: A Novel of the Past and Future (1969) describes a Near Future world in which Overpopulation crises have been solved. [JC]
Ascher, Maurice
(1873-1965) German author, much of his nonfiction being studies in Judaism and Jewish issues. He is of sf interest for Gulliver's Neue Reise ["Gulliver's New Journey"] (1915), a Fantastic Voyage tale based on Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726; rev 1735), Gulliver in this case being an aviator who makes a crash-landing on an unknown ...
Thompson, Harlan
(1894-1987) US author, mostly of juvenile Westerns that generally involved young boys and horses, some written as by Stephen Holt; he was President of the writers' organization PEN for a time in the 1950s. He is of sf interest for Silent Running (1972), the official novelization of the film Silent Running (1972), which deals with a Ruined Earth after ...
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 ...