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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
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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 ...
May, Emmet C
(1875-1947) US businessman and author, of some sf interest for White Bear and Gold: Tall Tales by the Wandering Jew (coll of linked stories 1931) (see Wandering Jew), which contains a range of stories, from examples of the Tall Tale [see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below] through faux-legends on to the depiction of a Lost Race discovered under ...
Breggin, Peter
(1936- ) US medical doctor and author who has published and broadcast controversially about psychiatry and the drug industry, whose collaboration in promulgating drug-based solutions to psychiatric and other problems he deprecates; his sf novel, After the Good War: A Love Story (1972), excoriates the use of remote-control Sex as a device to control, and to dehumanize, a Dystopian twenty-third-century ...
Time Out of Sequence
The Perception of events in a shuffled or apparently random sequence – as distinct from the simple negative of Time in Reverse – is played for laughs in F Anstey's Tourmalin's Time Cheques (A Farcical Extravagance) (1891; vt The Time Bargain; or, Tourmalin's Cheque Book 1905), where it generates an escalating sense of comic confusion. More usually, the effect ...
Secret Masters
A familiar aspect of sf Paranoia is the sense that small, anonymous and unreasonably powerful cabals – sometimes individuals (see Godgame) – secretly control or manipulate the world. Seemingly omnipotent groups of Villains are commonplace in both conspiracy theories and sf, the most famous instance being the Bavarian Illuminati whose alleged influence is deliriously recomplicated in Robert ...
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 ...