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Thursday 23 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 ...
Tangent, Patrick Quinn
Pseudonym of US author George Hamilton Phelps (1854-? ) US author of The New Columbia; Or, the Re-United States (1909) as by P Q Tangent, a somewhat coercive Utopia set in a Near Future where Canada has been assimilated into America, dissidents are deported, and a socialist government, rather harsher than its model in Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward ...
Weinstein, Howard
(1954- ) US author whose work has been restricted to Ties until the twenty-first century, when he began to publish the occasional short story. Ties for Star Trek (1966-1969) include The Covenant of the Crown (1981), Deep Domain (1987) and The Better Man (1994); those for Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987-1994) ...
Williams, Emlyn
(1905-1987) Welsh actor, playwright and author, his first plays being performed as early as 1922; several of them have mild inclinations to the supernatural. Headlong (1980), which was filmed as King Ralph (1991) directed by David S Ward, is an Alternate History tale in which an American, Ralph Jones, suddenly succeeds to the British throne after the entire royal family has died in an accident. The story diverges significantly ...
Walker, Samuel
Pseudonym of the US author (? -? ) of The Reign of Selfishness: A Story of Concentrated Wealth (1891; vt Dry Bread 1899), a Near Future tale in which a country-dominating trust collapses after the economy (see Economics) fails and a Pandemic afflicts the land; an idealistic business man takes over, ruralizes the country, introduces kindly forms ...
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 ...