SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Saturday 25 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 24 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 ...
Round Robin
Round-robin stories, in which multiple authors take turns to write sections or chapters of a continuous narrative, generally tend to be games played for the writers' own amusement rather than serious fictional enterprises. Such playful collaborations date back to the nineteenth century. One non-sf instance which had some modest commercial success was the very British mystery novel The Floating Admiral (1931) by "Certain Members of the Detection Club"; there were thirteen ...
SF Site
Web-based science fiction magazine launched by John O'Neill and Rodger Turner in June 1997, making it one of the oldest sf websites still in existence. O'Neill left to launch Black Gate, a site devoted primarily to fantasy and gaming (first issue, November 2000) but Turner continued as editor, assisted by Wayne McLaurin and Neil Walsh. Originally published as a rolling series of updates to the home page, the ...
Posey, Jay
(? - ) US Videogame designer and author, active in the former capacity from the late 1990s. After an involvement with two nonfantastic Tom Clancy franchises, the Ghost Recon and Rainbow Six series, he began publishing Military SF with his first series, the Legends of the Dustwalker sequence starting with Three (2013), set in a ...
Ruffan, Edmund
(1794-1865) US farmer, slaveholder, author, and soldier in the Confederate army who reputedly fired the first shot on Fort Sumter that started the Civil War; his Future History, Anticipations of the Future [for subtitle see Checklist] (1860), describes a war between the North and an independent South in 1868, during the course of which New York is sacked; the South wins. Ruffan was an unrelenting advocate of ...
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 ...