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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 ...
Kuang, R F
(1996- ) Chinese-born translator and author, in US from the age of four. Her ambitious fantasy sequence, The Poppy War series beginning with The Poppy War (2018), casts the twentieth-century story of China as an intensely complex but coherent drama with a large cast and much War. The anguish of lives conducted in the midst of history is conveyed with enough detail and analogy that it is possible to ...
Willmot, Eric
(1938-2014) Australian author whose Near Future sf novel, Below the Line (1991), describes the consequences of an Indonesian Invasion: Australia is broken into two Dystopias, as most Australians view this outcome, and run on Asian rules. The narrative itself expresses relatively little alarm – Willmot was of Aboriginal birth – and the ending is optimistic. [JC]
Road, The
Film (2009). Dimension Films and 2929 Productions present a Nick Wechsler/Chockstone Pictures production. Directed by John Hillcoat. Written by Joe Penhall, based on The Road (2006) by Cormac McCarthy. Cast includes Robert Duvall, Viggo Mortensen, Guy Pearce, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Charlize Theron and Michael K Williams. 111 minutes. Colour. / A father and son struggle to survive in a Near Future blighted by ...
Transmutation
According to tradition (though many prefer a more mystical interpretation), the great goal of those proto-Scientists the alchemists was the transmutation of elements – specifically of base metals, usually lead, into gold, by means of the elusive Philosopher's Stone. Examples of gold-making facilitated by sf Inventions rather than the devices of fantasy include J B Harris-Burland's ...
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 ...