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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.
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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 ...
Shea, Cornelius
(1863-1920) US author for the silent screen and author of dime novels (see Dime-Novel SF), prolific in many categories but best remembered for marvel stories using a fairly consistent "mythology" of dwarfs, subterranean eruptions, and stage illusion masquerading as supernatural magic. His first tale of sf interest seems to be The Air Voyagers; Or, a Trip to the Moon in a Balloon: A Tale of Wonderful Adventure (1880 chap), which may have been ...
Day Mars Invaded Earth, The
Film (1962). API/Twentieth Century Fox. Directed by Maury Dexter. Written by Harry Spalding. Cast includes Betty Beall, Lowell Brown, William Mims, Gregg Shank, Kent Taylor and Marie Windsor. 70 minutes. Black and white. / Scientist David Fielding (Taylor), with the help of associate Web Spenser (Mims), has overseen the pioneering landing of the first unmanned probe on Mars, which emitted a strange radio beam before becoming ...
Leacock, Stephen
(1869-1944) UK-born Canadian economist and author, in Canada from the age of eight, active as a writer from about 1890; of many books of humorous sketches, the most famous is perhaps Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (coll 1912), where he expresses a deeply conservative view of the world (his anti-Feminism included opposition to women's suffrage) with engaging warmth and humour. Sf often featured as the target of the more fantastical of his ...
WarGames
Film (1983). Sherwood Productions/MGM/UA. Directed by John Badham. Written by Lawrence Lasker, Walter F Parkes. Cast includes Matthew Broderick, Dabney Coleman, Barry Corbin, Ally Sheedy and John Wood. 113 minutes. Colour. / Senior defense officials in Colorado are seen deciding to transfer responsibility for responding to a Soviet attack from fallible humans to a Computer installation. Meanwhile in Seattle, teenager ...
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 ...