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Wednesday 22 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.
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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 ...
Message from Space
Japanese film (1978; original title Uchū Kara no Messēji). Toei Company, Tohokushinsha Film Corporation. Directed by Kinji Fukasaku. Written by Kinji Fukasaku, Shotaro Ishinomori, Hiro Matusda and Masahiro Noda. Cast includes Eisei Amamoto, Peggy Lee Brennan, Philip Casnoff, Sonny Chiba, Vic Morrow, Masazumi Okabe, Junkichi Orimoto, Hiroyuki Sanada, Makoto Satō, Isamu Shimizu and Etsuko Shihomi. 105 minutes. Colour. / When the planet of ...
Tate, Peter
(1940- ) Welsh journalist and author who began publishing sf with "The Post-Mortem People" for New Worlds in 1966 (vt "Beyond the Weeds" in SF 12, anth 1968, ed Judith Merril); this was assembled with his other short fiction as Seagulls under Glass and Other Stories (coll 1975). His first novel, The Thinking Seat (1969), began a loose sequence of tales featuring the ...
Pynchon, Thomas
(1937- ) US author who began to publish work of genre interest with "Mortality and Mercy in Vienna" in Epoch Magazine for Spring 1959; all of his works are Fabulations in that most of them resemble sf under some interpretations (see also Fantastika), and Against the Day (2006) is undoubtedly sf. Though the Paranoia-wracked worlds his protagonists inhabit may ...
Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft
(1797-1851) UK author, daughter of the philosopher and novelist William Godwin (1756-1836) [for entry on Godwin, see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below], and of the feminist and educationist Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) (see Feminism), who died eleven days after giving birth to her. Shelley married Percy Bysshe Shelley on 30 December 1816, two years ...
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 ...