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Thursday 23 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 ...
Captain Video
1. US tv serial (1949-1953 and 1955-1956). DuMont. Produced by Larry Menkin. DuMont was a New York television company; in the early years of television many programmes came from New York. Captain Video, a 30-minute children's programme that went out five nights a week, was the first sf on television. Written by Maurice Brockhauser, it starred Richard Coogan (replaced in 1950 by Al Hodge) as Captain Video, who 300 years from now, with the aid of his Video Rangers, battled various ...
Allen, Grant
Working name of Canadian-born author Charles Grant Blairfindie Allen (1848-1899); peripatetic in his youth, mostly in the UK from 1864, except for a period as Professor of Mental and Moral Philosophy at Queen's College, Jamaica, a prep school which failed in 1876; active as a writer from around 1875, publishing under his own name and as by Cecil Power, Olive Pratt Rayner, Martin Leach Warborough and J Arbuthnot Wilson. His first works of significance were nonfiction, comprising a series of ...
UFO
UK tv series (1970-1973). Century 21 Pictures Ltd Production/ITC. Created Gerry and Sylvia Anderson with Reg Hill. Executive producer Gerry Anderson. Produced by Reg Hill. Script editor Tony Barwick. Directors included Anderson, David Tomblin, Alan Perry, Dave Lane, Ken Turner. Writers included Barwick, Tomblin. Special effects Derek Meddings. 26 50-minute episodes. Colour. / Before this series the Andersons had been best known for their sf ...
Kuroma Hisashi
Working name of Japanese translator Hiroshi Sakuma (1951-1993), who had a profound impact on the sf genre as it appears to modern Japanese readers. A graduate in Law from the prestigious Tokyo University, he became a commercials director for Dentsū before drifting into translation and occasional criticism initially under the pen-name Seiki Shirakawa. / Kuroma's translations clustered around a group of authors whose works were suffused with neologisms or ...
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 ...