SF Encyclopedia Home Page
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 20 January 2025
Sponsor of the day: Joe Haldeman
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 ...
Craine, E J
(1881-? ) US bookkeeper and author of many Young Adult titles in the 1920s and 1930s, some of which rationalize supernatural elements; the only titles with genuine fantasy content are written for younger readers. She is of sf interest primarily for her Airplane Boys sequence (see Airplane Boys), which was also published – simultaneously or soon after – as the Flying Buddies sequence, or ...
Deutsch, A J
(1918-1969) US astronomer – after whom the crater Deutsch on the far side of the Moon is named – and author of the single much-anthologized story "A Subway Named Möbius" (December 1950 Astounding). Here the eponymous Transportation system – the Boston MTA (as it then was) Underground railway – develops such a high degree of topological complexity ...
Potter, David
(1874-1962) US naval officer and author who published nonfiction and sentimental novels under his own name and, pseudonymously, a Lost Race novel, The Lost Goddess (1908) as by Edward Barron, in which a beautiful descendant of the Mayans proves to come from a mysterious Island up a great South American river, where some of her folk have survived. [JC]
Libertarian SF
A political movement (see Politics) originating in and largely confined to the USA, libertarianism is a form of anarchism – or "minarchism", the desire for an extremely limited state – which emphasizes (nonviolent) competition rather than the voluntary cooperation proposed by the older strand of anarchist thinking, as exemplified by the writings of such theorists as Peter Kropotkin (1842-1921) or, in the sf field, by Ursula K ...
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 ...