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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 ...
Cox, James
(? - ) US filmmaker and author, of sf interest for his first novel, Grand Theft AI (2024), which could be described as a retro-Cyberpunk spoof, set in an exaggerated rendering of Near Future California. A comic heist of precious data governs the plot. [JC]
Simpson, George E
(1944-2009) US author, film scriptwriter and sound effects editor who worked with Universal Studios for several years. With Neal R Burger (1931-2005) he wrote three sf novels, all with a strong espionage-thriller flavour. Ghostboat (1976) centres on the submarine USS Candlefish, believed lost during World War Two, which reappears in modern times minus her crew. The solution of this mystery involves an uneasy mix of ...
Memory
The most dramatic fictional quirks of human memory are its loss or external manipulation, as discussed in the entries for Amnesia and Memory Edit (see also Dream Hacking). Also of occasional sf interest is the phenomenon of photographic or eidetic memory, sometimes treated as a minor Superpower. Among the best-known examples are: the eponym of Jorge Luis ...
Williams, David J
(1971- ) UK author whose Cyberpunk-flavoured Autumn Rain Trilogy – comprising The Mirrored Heavens (2008), The Burning Skies (2009) and The Machinery of Light (2010) – begins with the Near Future destruction of a Space Elevator and the assignment to protect America undertaken by two counterintelligence agents, who ...
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 ...