SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Monday 20 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
Sponsor of the day: Janine G Stinson
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 ...
Dath, Dietmar
(1970- ) German editor and author, active from the mid-1990s (see Germany since 1990). Several of his earlier novels contain homages to sf, though sometimes remotely: Am Blinden Ufer ["On the Blind Side"] (2000) alludes within an apocalyptic frame to H P Lovecraft and Michael Moorcock; and Dirac (2006) is ...
Nicolson, Marjorie Hope
(1894-1981) US scholar and academic, in the latter role at Smith College from 1929 to 1941, and at Columbia University from 1941 until 1962. Some of her work – like Newton Demands the Muse: Newton's Opticks and the Eighteenth Century Poets (1946) – is indirectly useful to students of Proto SF. Of direct interest in the study of early works in the field are two books focusing on the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: ...
Callinan, David
(? - ) UK author whose Fortress Manhattan (1995) hectically depicts a Near Future Manhattan (see New York) as an enclave whose internal environment is redolent of Cyberpunk, while beyond the walls Mutants and others clamour for entrance. [JC]
Attack from Space
Japanese/US film (1965). Shintoho. Directed by Teruo Ishii. Written by Ichiro Miyagawa. Cast includes Hiroshi Hayashi and Ken Utsui. 75 minutes. Black and white. / Compiled from episodes 5 and 6 of the Japanese Super Giant film series (see Tokusatsu): The Artificial Satellite and the Destruction of Humanity (1957; 39 minutes; original title ...
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 ...