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 ...
Tayler, J Lionel
(1874-1930) UK medical doctor, teacher, minister and author whose remarkable Scientific Romance, The Last of My Race: A Dream of the Future (1924), has perhaps suffered through its being structured as a dream. Ignoring (as proper) its debilitating, tagged-on conclusion, Tayler's Future History reads as a worthy precursor of the cosmic histories soon to be composed by Olaf ...
Carson, Robin
(? - ) Swedish-born author long in the USA whose Pawn of Time: An Extravaganza (1957) is a Time Travel tale somewhat reminiscent of the kind of tale typical of Unknown Magazine in the 1940s: in this case, a modern New Yorker whose name (significantly) is Urban, after his shift in time, comes to dominate early sixteenth-century Venice. [JC]
Tanaka Yoshiki
(1952- ) Japanese author of Space Opera, and Heroic Fantasy, initially as by Yutaka Rinoie, subsequently adopting a writing name that was pronounced the same as his birth name, albeit utilizing different characters. While studying for his bachelor's degree in Japanese literature at Gakushūin University, Tokyo, his first published story "Kansenchin no Satsujin" ["Murder at ...
Cooper, Richard
(1930-1998) UK author, mostly of scripts for children's television series, including Code Name Icarus (1984), a very Near Future tale about the exploitation of gifted children which he novelized as Code Name Icarus (1984), and Knights of God (1987), which he novelized as Knights of God (1987); the story is set in the year 2020, in an England ruled by a narrow theocracy whose leader is named, significantly, ...
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 ...