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
Sponsor of the day: Andy Richards of Cold Tonnage Books
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 ...
Utopia Science Fiction Magazine
US Prozine, specializing in Utopian sf, published by editor Tristan Evarts. Quarterly, August 2019-current. Its arrival foreshadowed the launch of several publications in the 2020s which expressed similar tiredness with the oversaturation of Dystopias in the genre. Issues focus on stories that incorporate actual science as a means of working towards a better future but make room for explorations of ...
Marryat, Florence
(1833-1899) UK author, playwright, editor (of London Society magazine 1872-1876) and actress, daughter of the naval officer and pioneering sea-story author Captain Frederick Marryat (1792-1848); now perhaps best remembered for her espousal of Spiritualism as recorded in such late nonfiction works as There Is No Death (1891) and The Spirit World (1894) [not listed below]. She was a prolific author of sensational novels from 1865 onwards, also publishing both ...
Forerunners
Term used in this encyclopedia for the frequent Space Opera plot device of a bygone Alien race which once dominated the galaxy but – following what may or may not be a significant Time Abyss – has mysteriously vanished, generally leaving behind numerous relics of its "Old Technology" which may serve as tempting McGuffins. Such artefacts often include enigmatic ...
Bama, James
(1926-2022) US artist and illustrator, active from before World War Two, in which he served. Some of his work as an illustrator was for sf magazines, beginning with the cover of Out of This World Adventures for December 1950; his work for the Saturday Evening Post was nonfantastic. His first book cover, for the nonfantastic A Bullet for Billy the Kid (1950) ...
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 ...