SF Encyclopedia Home Page
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.
Site updated on 20 January 2025
Sponsor of the day: Conversation 2023
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 ...
Dooner, Pierton W
(1844-1907) Canadian-born editor and author who immigrated to the USA in 1861. His Near Future tale, Last Days of the Republic (1880), was the first US Yellow Peril novel that could be described in sf terms, and demonstrates the terribly common dynamic by which a guilty party, or nation, feels compelled to transfer its guilt to the victim or victim-nation: in 1880, the year of the book's publication, Chinese coolies ...
Begbie, Harold
(1871-1929) UK journalist and author, active from the early 1890s, much of his later, nonfantastic work being published as by A Gentleman with a Duster; his first book publications, the Struwwelpeter sequence comprising The Political Struwwelpeter (coll 1899) and The Struwwelpeter Alphabet (coll 1900), are volumes of Satirical verse illustrated by F Carruthers Gould. Closer to sf are his ...
Chile
This entry provides an overview of Chilean sf during its early, classic and contemporary periods. / The Initial Phase (late-1800s to late-1950s) / In Chile, as in much of Latin America, scientific fiction imported from Europe and North America inspired local authors to apply the genre's themes and tropes to a regional or national context. By the late 1950s, Chilean authors had published some thirty works of sf, and although these texts appeared ...
Dinesen, Isak
Pseudonym of Danish author Karen Christenze von Blixen-Finecke (1885-1962), who also wrote as Karen Blixen, and as by Osceola and Pierre Andrézel; as Osceola she began to publish fiction as early as 1905, releasing much of this early work under a running head, Sandsynlige Historier ["Likely Stories"] between 1907 and 1909; some of this early work has been assembled in Efterladte Fortaellinger (coll 1975; cut, trans P M Mitchell and W D Paden of Danish-language ...
Robinson, Roger
(1943- ) UK computer programmer, bibliographer and publisher, active in UK Fandom for many years. The Writings of Henry Kenneth Bulmer (1983 chap; rev 1984 chap) is an exhaustive Bibliography of one of the most prolific sf writers, Kenneth Bulmer, and Who's Hugh?: An SF Reader's Guide to Pseudonyms (1987) is similarly exhaustive in its ...