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 ...
Green, Roger Lancelyn
(1918-1987) UK scholar, critic, translator (from classical Greek) and author, with a special interest in Fantasy, much of his fiction comprising retellings of traditional material for young readers. Tellers of Tales (1948) [for expansions of this title see Checklist below] is an invaluable early companion to this literature. He was a member of the Inklings group, and among his many works those most relevant to sf studies ...
Killdozer
Made-for-tv film (1974). Universal TV/ABC. Directed by Jerry London. Teleplay Richard Mackillop, Theodore Sturgeon, based on Sturgeon's "Killdozer!" (November 1944 Astounding). Cast includes Carl Betz, Neville Brand and Clint Walker. 74 minutes. Colour. / Though derived from Sturgeon's own well-known story about a huge bulldozer that becomes possessed by a seemingly Alien force – actually ...
Henderson, Zenna
(1917-1983) US author and schoolteacher who frequently used her teaching experience in Arizona and elsewhere as a base for her stories; perhaps significantly, given her treatment of Aliens as emblems of our better selves, during World War Two she taught interned Japanese-Americans in a relocation camp. Her first story was "Come on, Wagon!" for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction – the magazine with which she is mostly ...
Clock, Herbert
(1890-1979) US businessman and author, in active service during World War One, apparently senior collaborator with the lawyer Eric Boetzel (1884-1958), whose role was to cut the manuscript in half, on The Light in the Sky (1929), an sf tale set in the Underground Lost World of Atzlan, extending from Mexico into the Gulf of Mexico. Aztecs had retreated here after the genocidal ...
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 ...