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Wednesday 22 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.
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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 ...
Redfinn, Michael
(? - ) US author of Being (1988), an sf novel in which UFOs are proved to exist, justifying general Paranoia, as there has been a conspiracy to conceal them. [JC]
Ellison, Nina E
(? -? ) US author whose novel, Nadine: A Romance of Two Lives (1897), complicatedly (but competently) interweaves North American travelogue (much enjoyed by the eponymous heroine of the tale), arguments on Economic developments and possibilities in America, along with an sf narrative where an Invention, an electric thought-reading machine, helps solve a murder at the climax of a courtroom ...
Thompson, Harriet Alfarata
(1871-1922) US author of Idealia: A Utopia Dream; Or, Resthaven (1922 chap), whose protagonist visits a Utopian community for the elderly and the indigent whose features are so exceptionally humane, and racial stresses so muted (Thompson was Black), that this domestic Pastoral could readily be understood as occupying an Alternate World. [JC]
Kirmess, C H
Pseudonym of Australian newspaperman and author Frank Fox (1874-1960), in the UK from about 1909; in his Future War tale, The Australian Crisis (October 1908-August 1909 Lone Hand as "The Commonwealth Crisis"; 1909), an effeminate Near Future Australia is subject to Invasion by Asians (see Yellow Peril). Fox was knighted in 1926. [JC]
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 ...