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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 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 ...
Nichol, Nyah
(circa 2004- ) Canadian author whose Young Adult Tempus Trilogy sequence beginning with Broken Shards of Time (2020) follows the trajectory, via Time Travel, of its bereaved young protagonist, who finds in the future that she must confront an inimical version of herself, and come to maturity through this encounter. She is helped by her companions to ...
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
(1809-1894) US poet, essayist, editor, medical doctor and author, of sf interest in the latter capacity for Elsie Venner: A Romance of Destiny (January 1860-April 1861 The Atlantic Monthly as "The Professor's Story"; 1861 2vols), in which the classic fantasy and supernatural topos of the Lamia is reconstructed in terms of Biology: the eponymous young female, having been "poisoned" in the womb with rattlesnake venom (see ...
Capes, Bernard
(1854-1918) UK author, active from the late 1880s, initially writing as by Bevis Cane, his first novel, The Haunted Tower (1888), being under that name. Capes's first novel under his own name, The Mill of Silence (1897), is a complex supernatural tale, incorporating ghosts and hints of legendary upwellings. Some of his tales are of sf interest. At a Winter's Fire (coll 1899) includes "Moon Stricken" (December 1896 Cornhill Magazine), in which a ...
Dawson, Saranne
Pseudonym of US author Saranne Hoover (1941- ), who has also written as by Pamela Lind; she is the author of one sf romance, Greenfire (1990), under her own name, a Science Fantasy about the female leader of a tribe called upon to breed an heir, with some absent-minded references to Exogamy. From that point, she has written sf only as Saranne Dawson, beginning with The Enchanted Land ...
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 ...