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 24 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 ...
Lively, Adam
(1961- ) UK author, son of Penelope Lively (1931- ) [see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below], in whose first novel, Blue Fruit (1988), an eighteenth-century traveller in the Far East takes ship back to an Alternate World version of twentieth-century America, though this Fantastic Voyage ...
El-Mohtar, Amal
(1984- ) Canadian author, poet and editor who first began to publish work of genre interest with "The Crow's Caw" in Shimmer magazine for Summer 2006. She co-edited the online genre Poetry magazine Goblin Fruit (eight issues, 2008-2016), initially with Jessica P Wick and latterly with Caitlin Paxson. The Honey Month (coll 2010 chap) assembles honey-themed tales and verse, including one of her ...
Lathrop, George Parsons
(1851-1898) Hawaiian-born author, in US from childhood; his nonfiction appreciation of his father-in-law Nathaniel Hawthorne, A Study of Hawthorne (1876), and his editing of editions of Hawthorne's work, was perhaps intensified by his marriage to the author's daughter in 1871. Lathrop is of sf interest for "In the Deep of Time" (13 December 1896-3 January 1897 The Morning Times), a novella-length tale written "in Collaboration with ...
Rameau, Jean
Pseudonym of French author Laurent Labaigt (1858-1942), who first became well-known with the contes cruels assembled in Fantasmagories, histoires rapides ["Phantasmagorias: Rapid Tales"] (coll 1887), which contains some of the best examples of his very large output (reportedly 5,000 short stories in all); though condensed into a kind of surreal pointillism, sf motifs – the use of electricity as a universal Power Source, and portraits ...
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 ...