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 ...
Boyle, T Coraghessan
(1948- ) US author who sometimes signs his more recent work as T C Boyle; very much better known for his non-fantastic fiction – novels like World's End (1987) or The Road to Wellville (1993) – than for his relatively rare (and recent) sf. Several stories to be found in After the Plague: Stories (coll 2001) are of sf interest, including the Post-Holocaust title story, which is set ...
Edgar, Peter
Pseudonym of Peter Edgar King-Scott (1918-1993), UK engineer, lecturer, management consultant and author of nonfiction works on industrial management [not listed below]. His birth name lacked the hyphen, which he legally added in 1943. Edgar's Near Future sf novel is Cities of the Dead (1963), in which radiation from nuclear testing in the Pacific has caused various creatures Under the Sea to attain unnaturally huge ...
Wilson, Hazel
(1898-1992) US librarian and author, almost always for younger readers. She is best known for the Herbert sequence about adventures of a young lad whose careless parents allow him to get into pickles, beginning with Herbert (1950). Of some sf interest is Herbert's Space Trip (1955), where Herbert saves an Alien planet from disaster with the help of his Uncle Horace, who is resourceful, like most uncles in twentieth-century children's ...
Fritch, Charles E
(1927-2012) US author and editor who began publishing sf with "The Wallpaper" for Other Worlds in March 1951. He edited the magazine Gamma 1963-1965 and used the anagrammatic pseudonym Chester H Carlfi for one story there. His stories, written for a variety of markets but sharing a certain glibness and snappiness of effect, are collected in Crazy Mixed-Up Planet (coll 1969) and Horses' Asteroid (coll 1970); ...
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 ...