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 ...
Ball, John, Jr
(1911-1988) US commercial pilot and author, much better known for work in other genres – like In the Heat of the Night (1965) – than for his sf novels, the first of which, Operation Springboard (1958; vt Operation Space 1960), is a juvenile about a space race to Venus; The First Team (1971) is a Near Future thriller depicting underground resistance to a Russian takeover of America. [JC]
Shelton, William R
(1919-2001) US author who began to publish work of genre interest with "Moon Crazy" in The Saturday Evening Post for June 1949, and who wrote a number of nonfiction books about the American and Soviet space programmes, and related matters; Countdown (1960), grippingly told, is typical. Of specific sf interest is the Near Future Stowaway to the Moon: The Camelot Odyssey (1973), a ...
Clements, David
(? - ) Author of whom it is known only that his sole sf novel, for Robert Hale Limited, is The Backwater Man (1979). [DRL]
Doppelganger
Film (1969; vt Journey to the Far Side of the Sun). Century 21 Productions/Universal. Producers Gerry and Sylvia Anderson. Directed by Robert Parrish. Written by the Andersons, Donald James. Cast includes Ian Hendry, Herbert Lom, Lyn Loring, Roy Thinnes and Patrick Wymark. 101 minutes, cut to 94 minutes (US). Colour. / The first live-action feature from the Anderson production team responsible for a number of ...
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 ...