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Saturday 18 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
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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 ...
Hoffmann, E T A
(1776-1822) German composer, painter, lawyer, judge and author. For many years he had thought of himself primarily as a musician, being intensely involved in all aspects of Music, including many critical works and compositions – several of his operas, including Undine (first performed 1816) were produced successfully; in 1810, for the publication of one of these compositions – the Miserere in B Flat Minor ...
Chronopolis
French/Polish animated film (1982). Production du Cirque, Acteurs Auteurs Associés (AAA), Institut National de l'Audiovisuel (INA). Directed and written by Piotr Kamler. Music by Luc Ferrari. Colour. / First shown at the 1982 Cannes Film Festival, this film exists in two forms: a 67-minute version released in the US in 1983 with narration by Michael Lonsdale and a co-writing credit for Gabrielle Althen (this presumably ...
Lanchester, John
(1962- ) German-born journalist and author, in UK from 1972, most of whose fiction has been nonfantastic, though his first novel, The Debt to Pleasure (1996), comes close to regions of Fantastika as its gourmet protagonist travels through a surreal France, arriving at what he claims to be his home, which he immediately weaponizes. Capital (2012) is a nonfantastic anatomy of London and ...
Jonson, Ben
(1572-1637) UK poet, actor and playwright, after Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593) and William Shakespeare the pre-eminent dramatist of his era, active from the late 1590s till the year of his death. He was most famous for his astute and often highly satirical comedies, most notably Volpone (1605-1606), The Alchemist (1610) which satirized the gullibility of a public ready to accept any pseudoscientific nostrum, and ...
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 ...