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 ...
Giant Gila Monster, The
Film (1959). Hollywood Pictures Corporation/McLendon-Radio Pictures Distributing Company. Produced by Ken Curtis. Directed by Ray Kellogg. Written by Jay Simms from an original story by Kellogg. Cast includes George "Shug" Fisher, Fred Graham, Cecil Hunt, Lisa Simone, Janice Stone, Don Sullivan and Bob Thompson. Gay McLendon. 74 minutes. Black and white. / As the film begins, two teenage lovers are attacked and killed by the titular Monster in their ...
Fisher, Nancy
(? - ) US author of medical thrillers featuring drugs and techniques marginally in advance of what was available at the point of publication; Vital Parts (1993), for instance, concerns an Immortality Drug; Special Treatment (1996) is about a fitness-enhancement regime beyond the current professional sports medicine; Code Red (1998) and Code Blue ...
Harris, John
(1948- ) UK artist who received his formal training at Luton College of Art and then at Exeter University, where he began painting astronomical subjects. Graduating thence in 1970 he went to London, where he painted a few book covers before becoming a librarian. After spending several years in India studying transcendental meditation, he returned to the UK and began painting full-time. His first major commission was to produce three paintings for Alien Landscapes ...
Kipling, Arthur Wellesley
(1885-1947) US author of two Future-War novels. The New Dominion: A Tale of Tomorrow's War (1908), a Yellow Peril tale, pits the USA triumphantly against Japan and Germany, with the help of Great Britain; and The Shadow of Glory: Being a History of the Great War 1910-1911 (1910) unusually visualizes that the conflict so frequently predicted in Dreadful Warning tales of this period is in fact worldwide, ...
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 ...