SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Sunday 19 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 17 January 2025
Sponsor of the day: Andy Richards of Cold Tonnage Books
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 ...
Shattuck, William
(1864-1946) US author of The Keeper of the Salamander's Order: A Tale of Strange Adventure in Unknown Climes (1895), a Fantastic Voyage story whose protagonist, accompanied by demons and other creatures, visits strange lands and Islands, encountering at least one Lost Race en route. The author handles much of this material with an unsubtle Satirical brush. ...
Fearing, Kenneth
(1902-1961) US poet and author, who supported himself in early years in part by writing softcore pornography as by Kirk Wolff, and whose early renown as a poet faded perceptibly even before his death; he is now known mainly for mysteries like The Big Clock (1946), a tale whose atmosphere adumbrates the film-noir tonality of later US fantasy. Fearing's only sf novel proper is Clark Gifford's Body (1942), which gravely and literately portrays a ...
Ship of Fools
A traditional Fantasy theme dating back to medieval times, in which a ship – the Narrenschiff or Ship of Fools – carries all sorts of persons on an endless voyage in search of Utopia, providing an easily visualizable literal vehicle for allegorical Satire on the follies of humanity, the most famous such vehicle probably being "The Ship of Fools" (before 1500) by Hieronymus Bosch ...
Blackwood, Algernon
(1869-1951) UK author who spent a decade in Canada and the USA from the age of twenty, a period remembered in his partial autobiography Episodes Before Thirty (1923; vt Adventure Before Thirty 1934); a prolific author of novels and short stories for half a century. He served in World War One as an intelligence agent based in Switzerland, and in other roles. His novels of occult pantheism – best exemplified in ...
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 ...