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
Sponsor of the day: Joe Haldeman
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 ...
Robinson Crusoe on Mars
Film (1964). Schenck-Zabel/Paramount. Directed by Byron Haskin. Written by Ib Melchior, John C Higgins, remotely based on Robinson Crusoe (1719) by Daniel Defoe. Cast includes Vic Lundin and Paul Mantee. 109 minutes. Colour. / Haskin directed several sf films in the 1950s, including War of the Worlds (1953), and returned to the ...
Tilley, Patrick
(1928-2020) UK author who initially studied art at the University of Durham and worked as a graphic designer 1955-1968, then as a film scriptwriter. His first sf novel, Fade-Out (1975; exp 1977), after the fashion of borderline works like Fail-Safe (13-27 October 1962 Saturday Evening Post; 1962) by Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler, concentrates ...
Gateway S-F Magazine
A low- (and eventually non-) paying magazine which existed in both print and online editions, published by B Joseph Fekete Jr, North Hollywood, California; edited initially by Lawrence Green on the print edition and subsequently with an overall Editor-in-Chief (from 2003) John A M Darnell. The print issue ran for six issues, Winter 2000 to Summer 2003, all Digest size, saddle-stapled except for the last issue which was perfect bound, 144 pages. The online issue ...
Lorrain, Jean
Pseudonym of French poet, playwright and author Paul Alexandre Martin Duval (1855-1906), active (but already in ill health) from the early 1880s. The contes cruels and fantasticated fever-dreams for which he remains best known, and which established him as a central exponent (and dweller within) of late nineteenth-century Decadence, edge occasionally into sf topoi, but are more easily thought of in terms of a loosened ...
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 ...