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
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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 ...
Barbour, Douglas
(1940-2021) Canadian poet (author of at least fourteen volumes of poems, initially under the influence of Ezra Pound) and academic, a professor of English at the University of Alberta; his "Patterns of Meaning in the SF Novels of Ursula K. Le Guin, Joanna Russ and Samuel R. Delany, 1962-1972", accepted by Queen's University in 1976, was the first Canadian doctoral dissertation in the field of sf. A competent study of Delany was spun off from this volume: ...
Outland
Film (1981). Ladd Co. Directed by Peter Hyams. Written by Hyams. Cast includes Peter Boyle, Sean Connery and Frances Sternhagen. 109 minutes. Colour. / The setting is a mining base on Io, the third moon of Jupiter. The new marshal (Connery) discovers that the mine manager (Boyle), in a bid to increase production, is introducing powerful amphetamine Drugs which ultimately render the workers ...
Quark [tv]
US tv series (1977-1978). Columbia Picture Television for NBC-TV. Created by Buck Henry. Produced by Bruce Johnson. Directors included Hy Averback, Bruce Bilson, Peter H Hunt. Writers included Henry, Bruce Kane, Jonathan Kaufer, Robert Keats. Cast includes Cyb Barnstable, Patricia Barnstable, Richard Benjamin, Alan Caillou, Douglas Fowley (pilot only), Conrad Janis, Richard Kelton, Bobby Porter and Tim Thomerson. One 45-minute pilot episode plus eight 30-minute episodes. Colour. / In ...
Phillifent, John T
(1916-1976) UK electrical engineer and author of much sf and works in other genres; though he claimed to reserve his best material for publication under his own name; he was, however, probably better known under his pseudonym John Rackham, the name he used for most of his work. [Phillifent and Rackham titles are separated in the Checklist below]. He began writing sf with the Space Puppet series for Pearson's ...
Robinson, Roger
(1943- ) UK computer programmer, bibliographer and publisher, active in UK Fandom for many years. The Writings of Henry Kenneth Bulmer (1983 chap; rev 1984 chap) is an exhaustive Bibliography of one of the most prolific sf writers, Kenneth Bulmer, and Who's Hugh?: An SF Reader's Guide to Pseudonyms (1987) is similarly exhaustive in its ...