SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Monday 20 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 ...
Prentice, Harry
(? -? ) US author, possibly a pseudonym of James Otis Kaler; The King of Apeland: The Wonderful Adventures of a Young Animal Trainer (1888; vt The Boy Explorers: Or, How Philip Garland Became King of Apeland 1892) is effectively an unacknowledged translation of Leon Gozlan's Les Émotions de Polydore Marasquin; ou, Trois mois parmi les singes (1856 Journal Pour Tous; ...
Roanhorse, Rebecca
(1971- ) US author whose Native American/African American background figures articulately in her work; she began to publish stories of genre interest with "Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience™" (August 2017 Apex Magazine), which won a Nebula and a Hugo as best short story. Her first novel, Trail of Lightning (2018), which initiates the Sixth World ...
Fenn, George Manville
(1831-1909) UK teacher, publisher, editor and author, of whose 170 or more novels and collections, mostly for the Young Adult market, some are of sf interest, including The Golden Magnet: A Tale of the Land of the Incas (1884), a Lost Race tale set in South America; The Man With a Shadow (1888 3vols), in which a Mad Scientist's attempts to generate a state of ...
Thomson, Amy
(1958- ) US author whose first novel, Virtual Girl (1993), cunningly updates the Icon of the female Robot, long a locus for uneasy speculation among older sf writers (see Feminism). Maggie, the protagonist of this Near-Future tale, is an AI and consequently illegal, as independent artificial intelligences have been ...
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 ...