SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Sunday 19 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 17 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 ...
Butterworth, Michael
(1947- ) UK author, poet, publisher and editor, in the latter capacity initially of the semiprofessional magazine Concentrate (one issue, 1968), devoted to very short stories and poems (see Flash Fiction); then of the underground Corridor (five issues 1971-1974), later called Wordworks (two issues 1975-1976), which he re-launched in 2010 as a contemporary visual arts and writing journal under the title ...
Muir, Tamsyn
(? - ) Australian-born author, in New Zealand since infancy and in the UK from some point after 2010, who began publishing work of genre interest with "The House that Made the Sixteen Loops of Time" in Fantasy Magazine for February 2011, most of her subsequent short fiction being fantasy. Her first novel, Gideon the Ninth (in Tor.com Publishing 2019 Debut Sampler: Some of the Most Exciting New Voices in Science Fiction and Fantasy, ...
Dugdale, Henrietta
(1827-1918) UK born Feminist and author, in Australia from 1852, where her advocacy of women's rights, dating from 1869, was immensely influential. Australian women obtained the vote in 1902, much earlier than elsewhere. She is of specific sf interest for A Few Hours in a Far-Off Age (1883) as Mrs H A Dugdale, a Utopia whose narrator – suddenly transported to an extremely clean and spacious ...
Stark, Harriet
(1868-1944) US author in whose moral tale, The Bacillus of Beauty: A Romance of Today (1900), a lady is infected with a beauty-enhancing bacillus (see Biology). Her character – as dramatized through the diary she keeps – subsequently deteriorates, and she dies. [JC/PN]
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 ...