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 ...
Lai, Larissa
(1967- ) US-born academic and author, in Canada from childhood; much of her work examines implications, personal and cultural, of her Chinese-Canadian background. Her first novel, When Fox Is a Thousand (1995; rev 2004), is a complex tripartite fantasy, one of whose strands is narrated by a 1000-year old fox. Her second novel, Salt Fish Girl (2002), combines two narratives: that of an Immortal female ...
Wiles, Will
(? - ) UK journalist and author whose first novel, Care of Wooden Floors (2012), edges close to the fantastic in its depiction of the experience of interior life in an unnamed European City in terms evocative of the work of Franz Kafka. His second novel, The Way Inn (2014), Equipoisally intermixes ...
Shaara, Michael
(1928-1988) US author who began publishing sf with "All the Way Back" for Astounding in July 1952, the first of twenty-one stories he released in the 1950s, followed by a gap of more than two decades before he returned briefly to the form. Soldier Boy (coll 1982) assembles tales from both periods of his sf work, in which a slightly distanced diction is at times absorbingly applied to straightforward genre plots involving strange planets and ...
Zumas, Leni
(1972- ) US academic and author whose first book, Farewell Navigator: Stories (coll 2008), contains relatively few outright examples of Fantastika but (see Postmodernism and SF) often admixes an almost suburban mundanity with prescient flashes of the exorbitance of the world. Her first novel The Listeners (2012) slightly less successfully conflates elements of ...
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 ...