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 24 January 2025
Sponsor of the day: Joe Haldeman
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 ...
Amplifier
UK rock band from the Manchester area. Their first album, the heavy-duty Amplifier (2004) contains many sf touches, and closes with a long track, "UFO", in which Alien Spaceships and, strangely, U-boats, descend upon the earth. Better is their EP release The Astronaut Dismantles HAL (2006), whose songs, whilst not making explicit the disc's titular allusion to ...
Nevins, Albert J
(1915-1997) US Catholic priest, film director and author, whose Children's SF novel, The Adventures of Pancho of Peru (1953), describes the brave behaviour of the eponymous native, who has connections with a Lost World deep in the mountains. It was published as part of the didactic Adventures with a Purpose series. [JC]
Speculon
US professional Online Magazine published by Timothy Cooper, which ran for at least fifteen issues between August 2000 and January 2003, although virtually nothing can now be accessed on the internet. It began as an amateur magazine with a rather bland website and little promise. Cooper was frustrated with the lack of response to the issue and by receiving only two unsolicited submissions. He sought financial backing, which he obtained, and with that was ...
Barr, Densil Neve
Pseudonym of UK author Douglas Norton Buttrey (1918-1994), whose sf novel, The Man with Only One Head (1955), develops the theme of novels like Pat Frank's Mr Adam (1946): only one man (his name is Adams) is left fertile; and the subsequent moralistic World Federation set up to deal with the crisis is riddled with dissension. The effect is of offhand Satire rather than simple incompetence. [JC]
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 ...