SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Wednesday 22 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 ...
Hesky, Olga
(1912-1974) UK editor and author in whose wry and somewhat Surrealist sf novel, The Purple Armchair (1961), the Alien who resembles an armchair and is purple must decide whether or not the human race – caught in a near-future Dystopia dominated by Computers – should survive. Eventually the "chair" says no. [JC]
Smollett, Tobias
(1721-1771) Scottish medical practitioner (he did not gain a degree), journalist, translator, poet and author whose reputation has always suffered – certainly among the more dignified critics – through the sometimes distorting savagery of his Satire, a saeva indignatio he shares with other eighteenth century authors like Jonathan Swift. His first significant work of fiction in this vein, ...
Pears, Iain
(1955- ) UK art historian and author, perhaps best known for his Jonathan Argyll series of nonfantastic detective novels featuring an art historian [not listed below]. His most influential singleton, An Instance of the Fingerpost (1997), scrutinizes the same seventeenth-century intellectual revolution focused on by Neal Stephenson in his Baroque Trilogy: the metaphysics and politics attending the shift from ...
Villains and Vigilantes
Role Playing Game (1979). Fantasy Games Unlimited (FGU). Designed by Jeff Dee, Jack Herman. / Villains and Vigilantes was the most popular of the early Superhero themed RPGs, despite its inclusion of several design features that now seem questionable. Notably, characters are assigned a random assortment of Superpowers, making it ...
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 ...