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 24 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 ...
Freeman, Gillian
(1929-2019) UK author active from around 1955; she is of sf interest for The Leader (1966), set in the kind of Near Future Dystopian UK threatened, as not infrequently in novels of this category published in post-war UK, by the rise of a fascist nonentity through an increasingly ruthless exploitation of racial and ethnic prejudices to promote his Britain First party. The Undergrowth of Literature (1967), ...
Young, Laurence Ditto
(1882-1965) US engineer and author of The Climbing Doom (8 November 1908-?? Illustrated Sunday Magazine; 1909), a Lost Race novel set in the Andes. A Princess falls in love with a white explorer and they wed. [JC]
Roberts, Tony
Working name of British artist Anthony Roberts (1950- ), occasionally bylined thus but more often credited as Tony Roberts. After receiving artistic training at Wolverhampton College of Art from 1967 to 1969, and at Ravensbourne College of Art from 1969 to 1972, he almost immediately began painting sf book covers. While his first two covers – for a 1973 edition of Ralph Blum's The Simultaneous Man (1970) and a 1973 ...
Lincoln, Maurice
Pseudonym of UK author Esmond Condy (1887-1962), whose two sf Satires display an uneasy bantering tone and slyly cluttered plots which make his or her identification of some potential interest. In Nothing Ever Happens (1927) two young UK men are transported to an unlocatable Island run by an impossibly old Master – it is conceivable that T H White's similar The Master (1957) ...
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 ...