SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Monday 20 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 ...
Struck by Lightning
US tv series (1979). Fellows-Keegan Company/Paramount Television for CBS-TV. Based on characters created by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley in Frankenstein (1818; rev 1831). Produced by Michael Friedman. Director Joel Zwick. Writers included Bruce Kelish, Phillip John Taylor, Michael Russnow. Cast includes Jeff Cotler (Brian), Jack Elam, Bill Erwin (Glen Diamond), Jeffrey Kramer, Millie Slavin (Nora) and Richard Stahl ...
Maguire, Don
(1852-1933) US itinerant trader in the Arizona and elsewhere, and author whose reminiscences of his adventurous life, published long after his death as Gila Monsters and Red-Eyed Rattlesnakes: Don Maguire's Arizona Trading Expeditions, 1876-1879 (1997), may be as imaginative as The American Adventurer (coll 1879), a collection of stories, some of them tall tales. One, "The Story of the Second Traveler", is of sf interest: a shipwrecked sailor is rescued, taken to ...
Swan, Thor
(1903-1978) US author in whose Near Future Satire Furfooze: A Tale Fantastique (1939) the body of an advanced creature from the Ice Age is brought back to life (see Apes as Human). [JC]
Fischer, Leonard
(?1903-?1974) Canadian author whose Let Out the Beast (1950) is a Post-Holocaust reversion-to-savagery tale in which it is the protagonist who – unusually – becomes the feared enemy of those engaged in trying to rebuild civilization. [JC]
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 ...