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 20 January 2025
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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 ...
Taylor, S S
(? - ) US author whose Young Adult Expeditioners series beginning with The Expeditioners and the Treasure of Drowned Man's Canyon (2012) is set in an Alternate World version of Earth which boasts a wide range of previously unknown continents (see Imperialism), giving its young protagonists various opportunities to attempt to trace ...
Monkey Punch
(1937-2019) Working name of Kazuhiko Katō, a Japanese Manga artist, largely remembered for a crime caper series (see Crime and Punishment) with frequent crossovers into Equipoise and the Technothriller. His first few strips were published as by Kazuhiko Katō, a pseudonym written with different characters, but pronounced the same ...
Gorman, J T
(1869-? ) UK author of Young Adult books, usually of a military cast; he often signed himself Major J T Gorman. Of sf interest is Gorilla Gold (1937), whose young heroes traverse Africa in an autogiro, meeting a giant white gorilla and a pterodactyl en route. [JC]
Vortex, The
US Amateur Magazine, two issues 1947, edited by Gordon M Kull and George R Cowie from San Francisco. The Vortex is listed in some indexes as a Semiprozine because of the production quality of the first issue, although the content was by unknown amateurs and it was distributed free. It was attractively printed on glossy paper, in a square Digest format. All the money was spent on the first ...
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 ...