SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Sunday 26 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 24 January 2025
Sponsor of the day: John Howard
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 ...
Flipside of Dominick Hide, The
Made-for-tv film (1980). BBC TV. Directed by Alan Gibson. Teleplay Gibson, Jeremy Paul. Cast includes Peter Firth, Pippa Guard, Caroline Langrishe and Patrick Magee. 95 minutes. Colour. / This was an unexpected success, winning several awards. Hide (Firth) travels back in a flying saucer (see UFOs) from the somewhat austere 2130 CE to contemporary London to do historical research. A Candide-figure, he is confused but cheerful about what he finds, falls in ...
Altov, Genrikh
Pseudonym of Russian author and sf critic Genrikh Altshuller (1926-1998); a trained engineer, he registered dozens of patents, and is most widely known for establishing the Teoriya Resheniya Izobreatatelskikh Zadach (Theory of Inventive Problem Solving) or TRIZ. He spent four years in a prison camp for political dissidents after writing a scathing letter to Stalin criticizing the lack of industrial and scientific inventiveness in the USSR. His unpublished "Altov's Register" is a mammoth ...
Ingram, Kenneth
(1882-1965) UK barrister, lay theologian, and author of some novels in the field of the fantastic, including Midsummer Sanity (1933), in which Faerie [see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below] and mortal Earth intersect at the summer solstice, at which point the denizens of the former convey wisdom to the denizens of the latter. Three novels are of sf interest. In The Symbolic Island: A Novel ...
Little Badger, Darcie
(1987- ) US oceanographer and author much of whose work, most of it definable as fantasy or horror, directly and powerfully reflects her family background as a member of the Lipan Apache Tribe of Texas. She began to publish work of genre interest with "First Ride of the Day" in Vignettes from the End of the World (anth 2014) edited by Jacob Haddon. Her first novel, the Young Adult Elatsoe [pronounced el-at-so-ay] ...
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 ...