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.
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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 ...
Smith, Sherri L
(1971- ) US film developer, specializing in animation, and author, primarily of fiction for the Young Adult market, gaining some notice fo the nonfantastic Flygirl (2010), about a young African-American woman who passes for white during World War Two in order to fly in a noncombatant role (women were barred from combat roles during that conflict). Of sf interest is Orleans (2013), set in the ...
Maynard, Richard
(1926- ) UK-born author, resident in Australia, whose The Coconut Book (1985), about a man stranded on an Island, is of some interest. The Quiet Place (1988; vt The Return 1988) rather overcomplicatedly describes the long hegira of a group of astronauts who, due to time dilation (see Relativity), find a Ruined Earth landscape on their ...
Wormholes
Item of sf Terminology borrowed from speculative Physics; the term was coined in 1957 by the physicist John A Wheeler (1911-2008) to describe a hypothetical short-cut through space/time corresponding very roughly to the beloved sf concept of Hyperspace. Wormholes may be associated with Black Holes (another Wheeler coinage) and their once-fashionable but probably ...
Oyeyemi, Helen
(1984- ) Nigerian-born author, in the UK from infancy, latterly in Prague; none of her works could easily be called sf, even in the understanding sense that much twenty-first century work are tales that contain sf within the unruly water margins of Fantastika as a whole. It seems clear, however, that her fabulations, with their interlacings of African and British locations and modes of telling, seem instinct with fantastika. / ...
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 ...