SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Sunday 26 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.
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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 ...
Weldon, Fay
(1931-2023) UK Television and Radio scriptwriter, and author, active from the early 1960s; born Franklin Birkinshaw, granddaughter of Edgar Jepson and niece of Selwyn Jepson She began writing work of genre interest with "Angel, All Innocence" in The Thirteenth Ghost Book (anth 1977) edited by James Hale. Almost all of her work – with considerable ...
Kelley, William Melvin
(1937-2017) US author whose celebrated short novel A Different Drummer (1959) is an sf fable telling of Black history in an imaginary town in an imagined southern state of the USA (see Race in SF), and ending with a mass emigration of all Blacks from this state in 1957. The isolation of this town [for Polder see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below] is reminiscent of the ...
Poor Things
Film (2023). Element Pictures, Film4, Fruit Tree, Searchlight Picture. Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos. Written by Tony McNamara, based on the novel Poor Things (1992) by Alasdair Gray, itself very loosely based on Frankenstein; Or, the New Prometheus (1818 3vols) by Mary Shelley. Cast includes Willem Dafoe, Vicki Pepperdine, Mark Ruffalo, Emma Stone and Ramy Youssef. 141 minutes. ...
Finney, Charles G
(1905-1984) US newspaperman and author – named after but apparently not related to the famous revivalist minister, Charles Grandison Finney (1792-1875) – who spent the years 1927-1929 with the US infantry in Tientsin, China; an oriental influence pervades most of his work. His novels and stories, though Fantasy rather than sf, have been influential throughout the field, especially his famous The Circus of Dr Lao (1935), filmed less than ...
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 ...