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 ...
Jay, Peter
(1937-2024) UK author, economist and former diplomat who served as the UK Ambassador to the USA 1977-1979. His Future History Apocalypse 2000: Economic Breakdown and the Suicide of Democracy (1987) with Michael Stewart, was inefficient as fiction but acute about the pleasures and miseries of late capitalism, which is portrayed as being consumed by debt; that a despicable populist named Olaf D Le Rith (ie ...
Yelnick, Claude
(1923- ) French journalist, translator and author, active from the late 1930s, whose L'homme, cette maladie (1954; trans as The Trembling Tower 1956) depicts the inter-dimensional relationship between Earth and another Parallel World via a lighthouse. Among his translated works is Robin Cook's Outbreak (1987; trans as Virus 1988). [JC/DRL]
Penny, Laurie
(1986- ) UK author who began to publish work of genre interest with "Making Babies" in Terraform [online] for 13 April 2015; in her sf novel, Everything Belongs to the Future (2016), is set in a Near Future Britain, most of whose inhabitants have been comprehensively immiserated by the very rich, the 1% have access to an Immortality Drug, though the protagonist ...
Barton, William R
(1950- ) US author who has concentrated for most of his career on sf novels set in Space Opera arenas; within this normally expansive frame, he tends to focus on intimate venues, where stressful interactions amongst sometimes dysfunctional characters give a dark, closet-drama feel to his tales. His first novel, however, Hunting on Kunderer (1973), traditionally confronts humans with Alien natives on ...
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 ...