SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Saturday 25 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 ...
Steranko, James
(1938- ) US Comic-book illustrator, writer and one-time stage magician and escapologist; Jack Kirby based his comic-book character Mr Miracle – Super Escape Artist (1971) on Steranko. His byline is most often Jim Steranko, but sometimes just Steranko. Influenced early in his career by Kirby, Steranko rapidly developed a reputation for originality, especially with his work for ...
Merril, Judith
(1923-1997) US-born anthologist, critic and author, in Canada from 1968. Born Josephine Juliet Grossman, she preferred the forename Judith, and became Judith Zissman by her first marriage; she began to use the surname Merril before later marrying Frederik Pohl (1949-1953), and took Judith Merril as her legal name on becoming a Canadian citizen in 1973. She occasionally used the pseudonym Rose Sharon. Merril was associated with the ...
Dinosaurs
Our cultural fascination with the great lizards of prehuman Earth has inevitably led to much sf in which – as never in history – humans encounter living dinosaurs. This may take place in Prehistoric SF set in an anachronistic deep past, as in In the Morning of Time (coll of linked stories 1919) by Charles G D Roberts. A modern enclave of surviving dinosaurs is somewhat less risible. This ...
Worlds of Fear
US Comic (1952-1953). 9 issues (numbered #2-#10). Fawcett Publications Inc. Artists include Bob McCarthy, Sheldon Moldoff and Bob Powell. Harry Harrison drew at least one story, whilst Otto Binder (as Eando Binder) wrote the text story for #5 (neither were sf). 36 pages: #2-#8 had three strips, #9 and #10 four: all had a short text story. #10 also had a one-page non-fiction piece recounting ...
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 ...