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Tuesday 21 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 ...
Johnston, Mary
(1870-1936) US author of nonfantastic novels, several of which are of significance in the history of American Feminism, most importantly Hagar (1913), whose optimistic conclusion adumbrates a more Utopian world; and of some supernatural fictions [listed below for convenience]. She is of sf interest for The Wanderers (coll of linked stories 1917), which follows through prehistory (see ...
Mines, Samuel
(1909-1998) US editor who worked from 1942 for Standard Magazines, the chain that published Startling Stories and Thrilling Wonder Stories. Although an sf enthusiast – he published four stories in Thrilling Wonder Stories, beginning with "Find the Sculptor" in 1946 – he concentrated mainly editing on non-sf pulps until Sam Merwin Jr left the company in 1951, ...
Jupiter Ascending
Film (2015). Warner Bros/Village Roadshow Pictures/Dune Entertainment. Directed and written by Andy (now Lilly) Wachowski and Lana Wachowski. Cast includes Sean Bean, Douglas Booth, Mila Kunis, Tuppence Middleton, Eddie Redmayne, Channing Tatum. 127 minutes. Colour. / As well as an abundance of pleasurable visuals, and a sense that some of the shout-outs to both written and filmed sf are meant to draw a smile, there are moments in ...
Elison, Meg
(1982- ) US author whose first novel was The Book of the Unnamed Midwife (2014), a particularly grim Dystopia whose precipitating Disaster is the rapid onslaught of an autoimmune disease that kills most men and almost all women and children. The Post-Holocaust USA into which the title character awakens (after surviving her own illness) has all the worst excesses ...
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 ...