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 ...
Lincoln, Maurice
Pseudonym of UK author Esmond Condy (1887-1962), whose two sf Satires display an uneasy bantering tone and slyly cluttered plots which make his or her identification of some potential interest. In Nothing Ever Happens (1927) two young UK men are transported to an unlocatable Island run by an impossibly old Master – it is conceivable that T H White's similar The Master (1957) ...
Varlet, Théo
(1878-1938) French poet, translator and author, active from before 1900, though only after World War One as a novelist. Tales of sf interest include Les Titans du ciel (1921) and L'agonie de la Terre (1922) both with Octave Joncquel and comprising together one novel, L'épopée martienne: L'agonie de la Terre: Roman planétaire ("omni" 1922; trans Brian Stableford as The Martian Epic ...
Twilight Imperium
Board Game (1997). Fantasy Flight Games (FFG). Designed by Christian Petersen. / Twilight Imperium is a complex game of galactic conquest, scientific development, economic management, colonization and trade, played on a two-dimensional map with miniature models. The setting is a somewhat generic Space Opera in which a Galactic Empire ruled by a benevolent but arrogant race has ...
Randall, John D
(1944- ) US author of an extremely late Yellow Peril tale, The Tojo Virus (1991), in which a Japanese super-corporation plans to infect America's Computers with an incapacitating virus (see Paranoia). [JC]
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 ...