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Saturday 18 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.
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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 ...
Lindall, Edward
Pseudonym of Australian author Edward Ernest Smith (1915-1978), in whose Near Future sf novel, Roar of the Lion (1969), a 1980s insurrection, modelled on the example of the Viet Cong, ignites an Island in the South Pacific; the major powers soon intervene. [JC]
Comyns, Barbara
Working name of UK author Barbara Comyns-Carr (1907-1992), whose style's transfixed faux-naive simplicity intensifies the tone of pregnant magic realism (see Fabulation) that marks much of her work. In Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead (1954), a small isolated village is uncannily disrupted first by a flood then by a plague (the latter all the more uncanny in that it seems not to be Pandemic but entirely local) [for ...
MacDonald, Ronald
(1860-1933) UK actor, playwright and author, son of George MacDonald and father of Philip MacDonald, whose Near Future novel, The Election of Isabel (1907), features (as stated) the election of a woman to Parliament. [JC]
Freer, Dave
Working name of South African-born ichthyologist and author David Freer (1959- ), in Australia from 2010, much of whose work has been collaborations with Eric Flint, though The Forlorn (1999), his first novel, is a solo singleton set on a colony planet where humans and Aliens vie for access to a lost Matter Transmission technology. Series with Eric ...
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 ...