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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 ...
Williams, F Chenhalls
(1880-1965) UK minister, inventor (he patented an improved sash window catch) and author of several novels, two of which are sf. The Inner Number (1927) features a thought-reading Machine (see Psionics) which generates a romantic melodrama; in The Potter's Wheel (1931) as F C Williams, a Mad Scientist dies horribly after attempting to kill his daughter with his ...
Steele, Mary Q
(1922-1992) US author for children and for the Young Adult market, who also wrote as by Wilson Gage, under which name she wrote the Mrs Gaddy fantasies for younger readers [not listed below]; much of her work was nonfiction. Her first work of some interest in the field of the fantastic, Secret of the Fiery Gorge (1960) as by Wilson Gage, is fantasy. Work of sf interest includes The Journey Outside (1969), whose protagonists, who ...
Perimeter
Videogame (2004). K-D Lab (KDL). Designed by Andrey Kuzmin, Yulia Shaposhnikova, Michail Piskounov. Platforms: Win. / Perimeter is a Real Time Strategy game, set in a sequence of sub-worlds located in a region known as the Psychosphere (or, in a less felicitous translation from the original Russian, the Sponge). The Psychosphere is a separate layer of reality, one in which human fears and dreams become ...
Lerman, Rhoda
(1936-2015) US author whose first novel, Call Me Ishtar (1973), is a Satirical fantasy; she is of some sf interest for The Book of the Night (1984), an exercise in Timeslip Fantastika whose protagonist, only sometimes male, can be understood when female as a Temporal Adventuress (see Feminism; ...
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 ...