SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Friday 24 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 ...
Takami Kōshun
Working name of Hiroharu Takami (1969- ) a Japanese author whose sole work to date has been much refashioned and adapted across several media. A graduate of Osaka University's Literature department, where he specialized in the aesthetics of fine arts, Takami worked for several years as a journalist for the provincial newspaper Shikoku Shinbun. His debut novel, the Satire Battle Royale (1999) was ...
Luckhurst, Roger
(1967- ) UK academic and author who brings a wide armamentarium of lucidly deposed critical and cultural theory to the study of sf, which he defines – or restricts for his purposes – as becoming a cluster of modalities of strong interest toward the end of the nineteenth century, when "discourses" of modernism and sf begin inchoately to take shape and shape each other (see Identity; ...
Hartman, Emerson B
(?1888/1889-1969) US author whose Lunarchia: That Strange World Beneath the Moon's Crust (1937) began a projected six-volume interplanetary sequence in the Edgar Rice Burroughs vein with the discovery of a colourful civilization within the Moon. No further volumes appeared. In The Giant of the Sierras (1945) a Lost World is discovered in California inhabited by giants, ...
Ruth, Rod
(1912-1987) Working name of American artist Rodney Ruth. After growing up in a rustic area near Lake Michigan, which inspired a lifelong devotion to nature, Ruth moved to Chicago to receive artistic training at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts, the Frederick Mizen School of Arts, and the Institute of Design. Some freelance work eventually led to regular employment as a staff artist for the Chicago-based Ziff-Davis magazines, which included the sf magazines ...
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 ...