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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 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 ...
Cotton, Donald
(1928-1999) UK scriptwriter, who wrote an episode for Adam Adamant Lives! (1966-1967), but had more (though still limited) success with two scripts for Doctor Who, "The Myth Makers" (shown 1965), which he novelized as Doctor Who: The Myth Makers (1985), and "The Gunfighters" (shown 1966), which he novelized as Doctor Who: The Gunfighters (1985), both assembled as ...
Mad Max
Film (1979). Mad Max Pty. Directed by George Miller. Written by James McCausland, Miller, based on a story by Miller. Cast includes Tim Burns, Mel Gibson, Hugh Keays-Byrne and Joanne Samuel. 100 minutes, cut to 91 minutes. Colour. / This low-budget exploitation movie builds up to the vigilante-style revenge of spaced-out policeman Max Rockatansky (Gibson) – who is almost as disturbed as his antagonists – on the motorcycle gang that ...
Satterlee, W W
(1837-1893) US Methodist preacher and author, whose Looking Backward and What I Saw (1890), a dream narrative set in a Dystopian twenty-second century, takes on Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (1888) on the single tax, and adds comments the temperance point of view propounded earlier in his tract, The Political Prohibition Text-Book (1883). [JC]
Jones, Raymond F
(1915-1994) US author, very active for about fifteen years after he first appeared in Astounding in September 1941 with "Test of the Gods". He was virtually silent in the 1960s; some more routine novels appeared in the 1970s. His best-known short story is the witty "Noise Level" (December 1952 Astounding), an archetypal Astounding tale of Conceptual Breakthrough, scientific ...
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 ...