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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 ...
Onopa, Robert
(1943- ) US academic and author of The Pleasure Tube (1979), a tale in which an astronaut returns from space to a hallucinatory America and becomes entrapped, in the narrative present tense, in a Sex machine; Barry N Malzberg's influence seems clear. With David G Hartwell he edited Triquarterly 49 (anth 1980), a special sf issue of the magazine ...
Wright, William Henry
(1856-1934) US journalist and author, perhaps best known for his nonfiction The Black Bear (1910) about raising a bear named Ben from infancy. Of sf interest is The Great Bread Trust (1900 chap), a Satire on capitalist excesses in which an entrepreneur, after heading a cartel that corners the market in cereal, has himself proclaimed the King of America. [JC]
del Rey, Judy-Lynn
(1943-1986) US editor. She began her career in 1965 with Galaxy Science Fiction, becoming associate editor in 1969. Her predecessor was Lester del Rey; they married in 1971. She moved to Ballantine Books in 1973, bringing her husband in on the operation in 1974, and in 1977 was instrumental in forming the Del Rey imprint – named for her – of Ballantine (itself owned by Random House). ...
Lore, Pittacus
House Name owned by James Frey (1969- ) – not to be confused with James N Frey – a serially controversial author and screenwriter whose works include the heavily fabricated addiction memoir A Million Little Pieces (2003) and the contemporary Messiah fantasy The Final Testament of the Holy Bible (2011). The Lore house name is associated ...
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 ...