SF Encyclopedia Home Page
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.
Site updated on 20 January 2025
Sponsor of the day: Glasgow 2024 (Worldcon)
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 ...
Wilson, Miles
(1706-1776) UK author, curate and schoolmaster in Halton Gill, Littondale, Yorkshire, who wrote and published the Proto SF narrative The History of Israel Jobson, the Wandering Jew [for subtitle see Checklist] (1757 chap) as by M W, as a device for teaching his young pupils about astronomy. This story takes the titular Wandering Jew character – a cobbler – on an angelically mediated ...
Johnny Mnemonic
Film (1995). Limited Partnership. An Alliance Communications production. Directed by Robert Longo. Written by William Gibson, based on his story "Johnny Mnemonic" (May 1981 Omni). Cast includes Ice-T, Takeshi Kitano, Dina Meyer and Keanu Reeves. 96 minutes. Colour. / "Johnny Mnemonic" (May 1981 Omni), one of William Gibson's earliest stories, is about a future in ...
Lacey, Alan
(1926- ) UK author whose first novel, A Land Without Mercy (1974), combines fantasy and tropes out of Prehistoric SF without much energy in a tale of early Britain. The Love Warrior (1975) is a Planetary Romance set partly on what was once a colony planet of a now forgotten Earth, and where Wars are now conducted by soldiers in medieval garb with ...
Trew, Antony
(1906-1996) South African naval officer (mercantile and military) and author, in UK from the early 1960s; in World War Two he eventually commanded his own ship, primarily escorting convoys. His anti-apartheid opinions did not directly inform his fiction, most of it being historical dramas set at sea. Of sf interest are his first novel, Two Hours To Darkness (1962), a Near Future tale whose protagonist, a submarine captain who has gone mad, moves the ...
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 ...