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Friday 24 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 24 January 2025
Sponsor of the day: Joe Haldeman
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 ...
Nicholson, Sam
Pseudonym of US author Shirley Nikolaisen (? - ), who began to publish work of genre interest with "Magma Wave" in Galaxy for July 1975, but who was primarily associated over her relatively short active career with Analog, where the stories assembled as Captain Empirical (coll of linked stories 1979) first appeared. The protagonist, Captain Schuster, shifts from water-bound ships to a ...
Found Footage
A term infelicitously but irreversibly appropriated since 1999 to denote fictional feature films, particularly in Horror genres, which emulate venerable epistolary and documentary modes of textuality by using elements of non-fiction film form and simulated amateur-video footage. (Previously the term had marked a class of documentary film distinguished by the incorporation of archive and amateur footage into an assembled feature with or without commentary, a ...
Griffin, Russell M
(1943-1986) US academic and author who began publishing sf with his first novel, The Makeshift God (1979), an ambitiously overwritten and overlong but notably intelligent romance of origins, set initially in a drab Arab-dominated marginally pre-Cyberpunk USA, and then on a planet which houses mysteriously significant data about the deep human past. Century's End (1981) takes another blackly satirical look at the ...
Hooker, Le Roy
(1840-1906) Canadian minister and author, perhaps best known for a long poem in praise of the United Empire Loyalists (British subjects who emigrated northwards during and after the American Revolutionary War); of sf interest is Enoch The Philistine: A Traditional Romance of Philistia, Egypt and the Great Pyramid (1898), a Lost Race tale told in the first person by a man who experiences romance and desperation in the Middle East. [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 ...