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
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 ...
Stone, Idella Purnell
(1901-1982) Mexican-born teacher, librarian, editor and author who also wrote as Idella Purnell, in US intermittently from before 1920, though she spent considerable periods in Mexico; most of her fiction was written for the Young Adult market. Of some sf interest are two tales with Lost Race implications: in Lost Princess of Yucatan (1931), two girls discover in a secret location lost Mayan artefacts, including an ...
Allen, F M
Main pseudonym of Irish author and publisher Edmund Downey (1856-1937), in London for much of his working life after 1878 until 1906; he also wrote as by William D Hayes. In a sense, his fiction was self-published, as he owned the firms that published his books as by Allen; but both Downey & Co and Ward & Downey had reputable lists of authors beyond Downey himself. His short Disaster sequence, set in Ireland – ...
Minahan, John
(1933-2002) US author of the John Rawlings sequence of thrillers, the seventh of which, The Great Grave Robbery (1990), turns on the search for a thief who has risen from Suspended Animation (see also Cryonics). [JC]
Roberts, J W
(1824-1900) US newspaper publisher and author of Looking Within: The Misleading Tendencies of "Looking Backward" Made Manifest (1893), a Dystopia designed as its subtitle indicates to rebut Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward 2000-1888 (1888). The rich young protagonist, with the aid of a scientist whose potion puts him into Suspended Animation for a several ...
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 ...