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 24 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 ...
Haddad, Hubert
(1947- ) Tunisian-born poet, playwright and author, in France from 1950, active as a poet from the mid-1960s. His fiction is generically various, and may often be defined in terms of its diverse and ambitious transactions between myth and the quotidian (see Fantastika). He is of specific sf interest for Corps désirable (2015; trans Alyson Waters as Desirable Body 2018), whose protagonist, after suffering ...
Sherriff, R C
(1896-1975) UK screenwriter, playwright and author, active from 1919. He is best known for his hit play, the nonfantastic Journey's End (performed 9 December 1928 Apollo Theatre, London: 1929), directed by James Whale, who also directed the 1930 film version; it remains the best-known play about World War One, in which Sherriff had served 1914-1917. He also wrote the screenplay for Whale's version of the The ...
Messiahs
In the Mythology of the Old Testament the Messiah is the deliverer of prophecy, destined to lead the Jews to their salvation; the New Testament claims that Jesus Christ was the Messiah. The term is applied by analogy to any saviour or champion whose arrival is anticipated, hoped for or desperately needed. Because Christian images of the future have always been associated with ideas of the Millennium and the Apocalypse, a preoccupation ...
Harbottle, Philip
(1941- ) UK local government officer and sf researcher. Harbottle is the world authority on the works of John Russell Fearn (whom see for details of Harbottle's involvement in his posthumous career) whose literary estate he represents and with whom he has posthumously collaborated, completing several stories. His bibliographical study of Fearn is John Russell Fearn – an Evaluation (1963 chap; exp vt ...
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 ...