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Tuesday 21 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 20 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 ...
Bowker, Richard
(1950- ) US author who began publishing sf with "Side Effect" for Unearth in Summer 1977. His first novel, Forbidden Sanctuary (1982), treats a ticklish theological problem – whether an Alien whose possession of a soul is moot can claim sanctuary in a church – with due regard for the likely Roman Catholic view on the issue (see Religion). Replica ...
Fighting Fantasy
Gamebook series (from 1982). Puffin, Wizard Books. Designed by Steve Jackson, Ian Livingstone. / The idea of single-player Role Playing Game scenarios was first used in a number of adventures for the early fantasy game Tunnels and Trolls (1975 Flying Buffalo [FB]) designed by Ken St Andre, beginning with Buffalo Castle (1976 ...
Smith, W T F
(? -? ) US medical doctor, journalist and author of the lightly fictionalized The Trust Trusted (1906), apparently written as early as 1904, in which a new American president helps transform his land into a Utopia with common ownership of capital. [JC]
McQuay, Mike
Working name of US author Michael Dennis McQuay (1949-1995), who began to publish sf with his first novel, Life-Keeper (1980), which very competently presents the kind of scenario he unrelentingly promulgated in book after book: a noir world governed by corrupt forces; a tough, anarchic, street-wise male protagonist whose powers – and virtue – are very exceptional indeed; and a plot which gives plenty of opportunities for arena-like conflicts between that ...
Robinson, Roger
(1943- ) UK computer programmer, bibliographer and publisher, active in UK Fandom for many years. The Writings of Henry Kenneth Bulmer (1983 chap; rev 1984 chap) is an exhaustive Bibliography of one of the most prolific sf writers, Kenneth Bulmer, and Who's Hugh?: An SF Reader's Guide to Pseudonyms (1987) is similarly exhaustive in its ...