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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 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 ...
Hutchinson, Shaun David
(1978- ) US author of Young Adult novels, several of them sf, most of them directly or indirectly focused on issues of adolescent Sex; some of his protagonists, some of them gay, come close to suicide as they pass through the gauntlet of coming of age. The protagonist of his first novel, The Deathday Letter (2010), set in an indistinctly Near Future ...
To-day and To-morrow
This relatively early venture in popular Futures Studies comprises a series of eighty-six hardback monographs published from 1923 by the London house Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner and Company. In these slim volumes, Scientists and others speculated (not always entirely seriously) about the future. Several of them also wrote Scientific Romances, a form well designed to incorporate the ...
Telepathy
Telepathy or mind-reading is the most popular and durable paranormal ability in sf; its hypothetical roots in scientific reality are discussed under ESP, as are instances of pre-Genre SF usage and various stories which deal with telepathy as part of a wider spectrum of Psi Powers. Roger Luckhurst's The Invention of Telepathy: 1870-1901 (2002) usefully ...
Thorpe, Gav
Working name of UK game designer and author Gavin Thorpe (1974- ), most of whose work has consisted of Ties to the Warhammer 40,000 universe, beginning with Warhammer 40,000: 13th Legion (2000) ins the Warhammer 40,000: Last Chancers subseries. He has also contributed to the Warhammer fantasy universe, beginning with Warhammer: The Claws of Chaos: Slaves to Darkness, Book One ...
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 ...