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 ...
De Abaitua, Matthew
(1971- ) UK editor, journalist and author born Matthew Humphreys, legally changing his surname in early adulthood; active from the end of the nineties, a period marked by contributions to journals and with the nonfantastic "Inbetween" in Disco Biscuits (anth 1999) edited by Sarah Champion. He edited film.com from 2000 to 2009. He is of sf interest for his first two novels, very loosely assembled into the Red Men sequence, connections between ...
Coma
Film (1978). MGM. Directed by Michael Crichton. Written by Crichton, based on Coma (1977) by Robin Cook. Cast includes Genevieve Bujold, Michael Douglas, Rip Torn and Richard Widmark. 113 minutes. Colour. / Crichton's most commercially successful film, Coma is a present-day thriller with one sf element: the use of hospital patients, deliberately put into irreversible coma by using poisoned ...
Cromie, Robert
(1855-1907) Irish journalist and author, who began his career as an author of fiction with a Future War novel, For England's Sake (1889), a somewhat congested tale set in Near Future India, in which loyal native forces turn the tide against invading Russia; a later loosely connected tale, The Next Crusade (1896), continues the action in eastern Europe: luckily, the novel ends with the Mediterranean ...
Reid, T Mayne
(1818-1883) Irish-born UK author, in the US 1840-1849 and 1867-1870, setting several of his most successful novels there, including The Headless Horseman: A Strange Tale of Texas (March 1865-October 1866 Bentley's Magazine; 1866 2vols). One of the earliest examples of the Western – with Comanches on the warpath, shoot-outs, ambushes, brawls, lynchings, and a nearly invulnerable hero sporting a secret identity – Headless Horseman is also a ghost story, but ...
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 ...