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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.
Site updated on 24 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 ...
Mysterious Stranger
John Gardner has been credited for claiming that there are only two plots: journey and arrival; it may be added that the stranger who comes to town may well be returning. Though some examples of the two main plots are different aspects of a single story (perhaps most are; see Odyssey below), this entry focuses on the second primal tale. The first Mysterious Stranger in the traditional Western Canon may be the Serpent in the Garden of Eden (see ...
Pierlot, Ciel
(? - ) US digital artist and author whose first novel, Bluebird (2022), is an adventure-oriented Space Opera set in an interstellar arena; the mercenary protagonist (see Military SF) must save her twin sister, a mission which may involve the return of a hidden artefact or Weapon or secret, though this may be avoided through the aid of her ...
Ward, Herbert D
(1861-1932) US author, most of whose short stories of sf interest were political dramas whose venues were only marginally displaced from late-nineteenth-century America, even though some of the tales assembled in A Republic Without a President, and Other Stories (coll dated 1891 but 1893) were ostensibly set a century hence. The White Crown, and Other Stories (coll 1894) continued in the same vein, though the title story itself is a ...
Taylor, Jefferys
(1792-1853) UK author, one of several children of Isaac Taylor (1759-1829), an engraver and author; most of Jefferys Taylor's siblings published books, including Isaac Taylor, not to be confused with their father. He is of some sf interest for The Young Islanders; Or, the School-Boy Crusoes: A Tale of the Last Century (1842), a Robinsonade describing the adventures of a group of lads cast away on a deserted ...
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 ...