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: Andy Richards of Cold Tonnage Books
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 ...
Khoury, Jessica
(1980- ) US author whose Young Adult Corpus series beginning with Origin (2012) follows the experiences of various teenagers who have been subjected to what seems to be intense Genetic Engineering but which may involve the creation of Androids, at least some of them Immortal. The mysterious Corpus organization gradually ...
End of Time
As Robert Louis Stevenson famously wrote, "It is better to travel hopefully than to arrive." The sf interest of the End of Time lies in the getting there – especially the final stages of the journey – rather than the hypothetical place (or time) itself, which is presumably by definition event-free (but see Omega Point). / The most typical sf end-of-time scenario concerns the ...
Welcome to Blood City
Film (1977). An EMI/Len Herberman Production. Directed by Peter Sasdy. Written by Stephen Schneck, Michael Winder. Cast includes Keir Dullea, Samantha Eggar, Barry Morse and Jack Palance. 96 minutes. Colour. / This UK/Canadian coproduction is one of the earlier movies to take Virtual Reality as its theme (but see also Welt Am Draht [1973]). A group of Amnesiacs find themselves in ...
Hardy, David A
(1936- ) UK artist and illustrator, known at least as much for his astronomical and space-exploration paintings, done in the accurate tradition of Chesley Bonestell, as for his sf work. Hardy is essentially a self-taught artist, though he attended the Margaret Street College of Art in Birmingham circa 1960 on day release from his illustration work for the chocolate manufacturer Cadbury, during which employment he honed his ...
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 ...