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 ...
West, Lindsay
Pseudonym of US author Nancy Weber (1942- ), married to Charles Platt (1977-circa 1980), who writes romances as by Jennifer Rose. The Empire of the Ants (1977) is a Tie novelizing The Empire of the Ants (1977; vt H G Wells' Empire of the Ants) directed by Bert I Gordon. [JC]
Tenn, William
Pseudonym of UK-born academic and author Philip Klass (1920-2010), whose American parents brought him to the US in his infancy; some early sketches, later assembled as The Evolution of William Tenn or Myself When Young (coll 1991 chap), first appeared in a New York University magazine during 1939; he taught writing and sf at The Pennsylvania State University between 1966 and 1988. After serving in World War Two, Klass began writing sf as by William Tenn, the name he used for all ...
Cosmic Stories
1. See Amateur Magazine; Jerry Siegel. / 2. US Pulp magazine, three bimonthly issues, March to July 1941, edited by Donald A Wollheim. Cosmic Stories was one of two companion magazines (the other being Stirring Science Stories) started by Wollheim in 1941 and published by Albing ...
Notes on Content
The notes below, from the 1993 second edition, are largely unrevised. In general we have been able to relax many constraints previously forced on us by the space limitations of a single printed volume. Some authors of short stories only, like Vance Aandahl, appeared in the first edition, were cut to save space in the second and are now restored; there are similar cases among print magazines not exclusively devoted to sf but of considerable sf interest, such ...
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 ...