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: The League of Fan Funds
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 ...
Mudd, Steve
(? - ) US author whose sf novels in the Tangled Webs Space Opera sequence, comprising Tangled Webs (1989) and The Planet Beyond (1990), are adventures set in a totalitarian Galactic Empire. [JC]
Sowden, Lewis
(1903-1974) UK-born South African newspaperman and author, in Israel from 1966, whose The Man Who Was Emperor: A Romance (1946) is set in an imaginary country of marginal sf interest. Tomorrow's Comet: A Tale of our own Times (July-August 1949 Blue Book as "Star of Doom"; 1951) deals with the End of the World in psychological terms. [JC/PN]
Pène du Bois, William
(1916-1993) US illustrator, art editor and designer (for the Paris Review, of which he was a founding editor, between 1953 and 1960) and author; son of the painter Guy Pène du Bois (1884-1958), whose work had some influence on him. His own novels, which he illustrated himself (he also illustrated other writers' books), are usually juveniles, though the bold intricacy of his illustrations are of general interest, and are quite capable of conveying a ...
Lugones, Leopoldo
Working name of Argentine teacher, journalist and author Leopoldo Lugones Argüello (1874-1938), a central figure in the early twentieth century development of sf in that country; he was an extremely early Modernist – Spanish American Modernism flourished circa 1880-1920 – a movement whose goal was to integrate the variegated literatures of Latin America into the dominant European tradition, without losing the autonomy of the native: a task which, if successfully ...
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 ...