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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.
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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 ...
MacMillan, Armour
(1882-1939) UK author of a Timeslip tale, The Incredible Adventure (1928), uneasily Equipoisal in its depiction of the experiences of a modern banker who awakens in the Greece of 30 BCE able to speak the language; pretending he is from Atlantis, he creates considerable stir through his descriptions of various Inventions, including the motorcar. His ...
Philip, Alex
Working name of Alexander Philip (1882-1968) Scotland-born entrepreneur and author, in US with family from 1884 and in Canada from circa 1900. He is of sf interest for his Lost Race novel, The Painted Cliff (1927), set deep in a valley in the mountains of British Columbia where an ancient white civilization (Philip is condescending to Native Americans) is discovered. [JC]
Paterson, Isabel
(1886-1961) Canadian journalist, literary critic and author, in the US from around 1915, whose The God of the Machine (1943) originated many of the tenets of libertarianism (see Libertarian SF) whose intellectual interactions with Ayn Rand from the 1930s on were mutually influential. Of her fiction, The Road of the Gods (1930) is a Lost Race novel set in Germany 2,000 ...
Wilde, Oscar
(1854-1900) Irish journalist, playwright, poet and author, mostly in UK from 1874; noted for the witty epigrams which characterize much of his writing. Among his most enduring works are his social comedy plays, such as Lady Windermere's Fan (first performed 20 February 1892; 1893) and especially The Importance of Being Earnest (first performed 14 February 1895; 1898). Of primary genre interest is his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (July 1890 ...
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 ...