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 ...
King of Thorn
Japanese animated film (2010). Original title Ibara no Ou. Sunrise. Based on the Manga by Yuji Iwahara. Directed by Kazuyoshi Katayama. Written by Kazuyoshi Katayama and Hiroshi Yamaguchi. Cast includes Kana Hanazawa, Tsutomu Isobe, Toshiyuki Morikawa, Eri Sendai and Akiko Yajima. 109 minutes. Colour. / After a 30-60 day incubation period, Acquired Cellular Induration Syndrome (ACIS), popularly known as Medusa, fatally ...
Brissett, Jennifer Marie
(1969- ) London-born software engineer and author, in USA from the age of four, who began publishing work of genre interest with "The Executioner" in Warrior Wisewoman 2 (anth 2009) edited by Roby James. The apparent over-complicatedness of her first novel, Elysium (2014), dissolves in the unpacking of the intricate but lucid story, which is initially set in an unnamed (but identifiable) version of New York, where a ...
Jennings, Gordon
(1896-1953) Special effects pioneer who worked on nearly 200 films in his long career. These included Dr Cyclops (1940), and the supernatural comedy-romance I Married a Witch (1942). He is of most importance to the sf film for overseeing the effects for The War of the Worlds (1953). Unfortunately Jennings died before this film's release and subsequent great success. [GSt]
Harrison, G B
(1894-1991) UK scholar, editor of three editions of the works of William Shakespeare, perhaps now best known for his five-volume compilation/recreation of Elizabethan and Jacobean journals beginning with An Elizabethan Journal: Being a Record of Those Things Most Talked About During the Years 1591-1594 (1928); mostly in the USA or elsewhere abroad after 1943. Of sf interest is The Fires of Arcadia (1965), in which a scientist ...
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 ...