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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 ...
Nutty Professor, The
Film (1963). Jerry Lewis Productions/Paramount. Directed by Jerry Lewis. Written by Lewis, Bill Richmond. Cast includes Kathleen Freeman, Lewis, Dell Moore, Howard Morris and Stella Stevens. 107 minutes. Colour. / Even those who do not normally enjoy the heavily overstated comedy of Lewis, which depends a lot on gesticulation and face-pulling, admit this to be one of his best films; it is a remake as a campus comedy of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, ...
Lebow, Richard Ned
(1941- ) French-born political scientist, in US from infancy, prolific in his field for many years; he is of sf interest for two recent volumes. Forbidden Fruit: Counterfactuals and International Relations (2010) is a sustained analysis of Alternate History narratives, which he calls Counterfactuals, a term perhaps too easily understood to imply that historical facts are safely ...
Hawkins, Peter
(1926- ) UK bank clerk whose first sf sale was "Life Cycle" for New Worlds in Spring 1951; his 14 stories under his own name all appeared in that magazine and in Science Fantasy over the following decade. He published a routine sf adventure, The Plant from Infinity (1954) as by Karl Maras, a House Name. [JC]
Godwin, Tom
Working name of US author Thomas William Godwin (1915-1980), whose life and career were afflicted by disease and misfortune: family tragedies caused him to leave school after third grade, kyphosis misshaped his spine and truncated his military career, and he was an alcoholic. He published the first of approximately thirty sf stories, "The Gulf Between", in Astounding for October 1953, and soon after wrote his most famous and compelling tale, "The Cold Equations" (August ...
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 ...