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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 ...
Rendal, Justine
(1948-2004) US author born Randy Goldfield who changed her name legally to Justine Olivia Rendal; in her Young Adult sf tale, A Very Personal Computer (2004), an adolescent in crisis is helped by his Computer, which contains a seemingly sentient program or AI called Conner, which guides him through his difficult times. [JC]
Jones, Gonner
(1932- ) UK author of The Dome (1968), in which the eponymous brain, which is governed by a Computer, is in charge of a future City. [PN]
Bradshaw, William R
(1851-1927) Irish-born editor and author, in the US from 1883, whose The Goddess of Atvatabar: Being the History of the Discovery of the Interior World and Conquest of Atvatabar (1892) is set in a Symmesian Hollow Earth with an interior sun shining vertically overhead: "See how the shadow of every man surrounds his boots!". In his introduction, Julian Hawthorne asserts ...
Skillingstead, Jack
(1955- ) US author, married to Nancy Kress from 2011; he began to publish work of genre interest with "The Apprentice" in Whispers from the Shattered Forum for June 2003. With other short work it was assembled in Are You There and Other Stories (coll 2009; exp 2014); the cumulative propulsive energy of his short work, much of it not sf, is very considerable. An sf tale like "Bean There" (April 2005 ...
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 ...