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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 ...
Dawson, Saranne
Pseudonym of US author Saranne Hoover (1941- ), who has also written as by Pamela Lind; she is the author of one sf romance, Greenfire (1990), under her own name, a Science Fantasy about the female leader of a tribe called upon to breed an heir, with some absent-minded references to Exogamy. From that point, she has written sf only as Saranne Dawson, beginning with The Enchanted Land ...
McLaughlin, Dean
(1931- ) US author who began publishing sf with "For Those who Follow After" for Astounding in July 1951. Of his three sf novels to appear in book form – Dome World (March 1958 Astounding as "The Man on the Bottom"; exp 1962), The Fury from Earth (1963) and The Man Who Wanted Stars (fixup 1965) – the last is probably the best, though all of these straightforward ...
Roberts, J W
(1824-1900) US newspaper publisher and author of Looking Within: The Misleading Tendencies of "Looking Backward" Made Manifest (1893), a Dystopia designed as its subtitle indicates to rebut Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward 2000-1888 (1888). The rich young protagonist, with the aid of a scientist whose potion puts him into Suspended Animation for a several ...
Skyhook
US Fanzine edited by Redd Boggs (1921-1996); also known as Sky Hook. Twenty-five issues, quarterly although with irregularities, from Winter 1948 to Autumn 1957. Of particular note was the "Pro-Phile" critical column by James Blish writing as William Atheling Jr, launched in issue 15 (Autumn 1952): these essays made up the bulk of Blish's first book of sf criticism, The Issue at Hand (coll 1964) as by William ...
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 ...