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 ...
Jameson, Storm
(1891-1986) UK author, the first woman to gain a BA from Leeds University (a first class degree, in 1912); the early loss of a brother in conflict transformed her initial support for the handling of World War One into an eloquent advocacy of rational strategies for maintaining civilization, including her sponsoring of the Peace Pledge Union in 1934. She had already begun to publish a series of cultural and literary studies that illuminate the 1920s – a ...
Forti, Kathy J
(?p- ) US psychologist, entrepreneur and author who is of sf interest for her STACKS sequence beginning with STACKS: Library of Truth (2022), whose primary (or at least initial) setting is the Library of Congress in Washington, where a portal has been opened into another Dimension which contains a secret Deep-Throat archive full of revelations about corruption up in the world, as well as holographs recording the whole ...
Easson, Robert
(1941- ) UK author living in the USA; his slim and eccentric sf story collection is The Bird; The Ghoul; and, In the Name of My Friend (coll 1968 chap). [JC/DRL]
Cryonics
A term coined in the 1960s by Karl Werner, referring to techniques for preserving the human body by supercooling. R C W Ettinger's The Prospect of Immortality (1964) popularized the idea that the corpses of terminally ill people might be "frozen down" in order to preserve them until such a time as medical science would discover cures for all ills and a method of resurrecting the dead. Many sf stories have extrapolated the notion. / The ...
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 ...