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 ...
Tartakovsky, Genndy
(1970- ) Russian-American director, scriptwriter, producer and animator whose family moved from the USSR to the US (via Italy) when he was seven. After studying at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), he briefly worked for Lapiz Azul Productions on Batman: The Animated Series (1992-1994) (see The Adventures of Batman and Robin). When Craig McCracken ...
Kaveney, Roz
(1949- ) UK critic, editor and author. Her sf criticism, beginning in the late 1970s (before 1980 as by Andrew Kaveney), has appeared in specialist journals like Foundation and in non-genre outlets like the Washington Post and Books and Bookmen; it is marked by a seemingly off-hand general erudition and a knowing sharpness about the field; she created the term ...
Caldwell, Taylor
(1900-1985) UK-born author, in US from childhood, who concentrated on extremely successful suspense-filled family sagas. Her first sf novel, The Devil's Advocate (1952), though set in 1970, is effectively a right-wing denunciation of the New Deal of the 1930s, whose welfare policies (it suggests) have made an oppressive Dystopia inevitable; fortunately, rebels known as the Minute Men are destined to save the day. Her second effort, ...
Ebbs, Paul
(circa 1965- ) UK poet, screenwriter and author, in the latter two capacities producing content in various theatres of the Doctor Who universe: Doctor Who: New Adventures: The Book of the Still (2002), in which a Book serves as a lifeline for stranded time travellers (see Time Travel), the story spiralling complexly (for this universe) into a kind of Bollywood musical extravaganza; and ...
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 ...