SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 21 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: Ted Chiang
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 ...
Ijäs, Jyrki
(1943-2010) Finnish film editor, translator and journalist, the first of whose (few) sf stories was "Koekaniini" ["Guinea Pig"] in 1968. One of the founders of Aikakone magazine (see Finland), he was also publisher and editor of Ikaros magazine, winner of the Finnish Kosmoskynä award in 1988, editor of Ensimmäinen yhteys ["First Contact"] (anth 1988), organizer (with others) of the first Finncon ...
Fowler, Christopher
(1953-2023) UK advertising copywriter, film marketer (through his firm The Creative Partnership) and author, mostly of Horror tales and thrillers, also using the pseudonym L K Fox. He began to publish work of genre interest with the stories assembled in his first work of fiction, City Jitters (coll 1986): several of these tales are focused on London, where much of his work was set, including his first novel, ...
Bird, William Henry Fleming
(1896-1971) UK art lecturer and author, in active service during World War One, who published some magazine sf in the 1950s under his own name, and also as John Toucan and John Eagle. His debut story was "War Potential" (October 1952 Tales of Tomorrow) as by John Toucan, and the first under his own name was "Critical Age" (1953 Futuristic Science Stories #12). Later work was ...
Schwartz, Helen Ruth
(? - ) US author whose sf novel, The Meadowlark Sings (2006), is set in a Near Future Dystopian America governed by the fundamentalist right whose homophobia (see Sex) is given teeth by the discovery of the "Scarpetta gene", which causes homosexuality. When in 2018 an earthquake calves off part of California, which becomes an ...
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 ...