SF Encyclopedia Home Page
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 ...
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 ...
Viking, Otto
(1885-1966) Danish Catholic bishop, associated with Theosophy, and author whose sf novel is A klode griber ind (written 1954; 1961; trans as A World Intervenes 1964). A young Danish couple is recruited by a secret organization based on Venus that makes use of flying saucers (see UFOs) and has planted a hidden colony in Antarctica, aiming to help Earth through its crisis of development ...
Rand, Peter
(1942- ) US author of The Time of the Emergency (1977), an sf novel set in a world subsequent to a nuclear Holocaust – but how much farther into the future it is hard to distinguish – so that the abstract desert and surreal hotel that provide a stage for the four protagonists' shattered behaviour may in fact be described as inhabiting a Ruined Earth. [JC]
Schulman, Helen
(1961- ) US screenwriter and author, most of whose work has consisted of nonfantastic scrutinies of the complex patterns of contemporary life among the relatively affluent. She is of sf interest for her sixth novel, Come With Me (2018), in which members of a Silicon Valley family (see California) attempt to extract themselves from the perplexities of their affluent but emotionally desiccant lives by making use of a ...
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 ...