SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Monday 20 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 ...
Transmutation
According to tradition (though many prefer a more mystical interpretation), the great goal of those proto-Scientists the alchemists was the transmutation of elements – specifically of base metals, usually lead, into gold, by means of the elusive Philosopher's Stone. Examples of gold-making facilitated by sf Inventions rather than the devices of fantasy include J B Harris-Burland's ...
Roberts, Bechhofer
(1894-1949) UK journalist and author, in active service during World War One. He wrote two thematically connected Near Future spoofs on bureaucracy: The Birdseed Pool (1940), where the chair of a Government control board, appointed through nepotism, fails to rationalize the market for birdseed as World War Two deepens; and the similar Sunrise in the West: An Absurdity ...
Bell, Neil
Preferred pseudonym of UK author Stephen Southwold (1887-1964), born Stephen Henry Critten; he took the name Southwold from his birthplace in Suffolk, because he despised his father, for reasons made clear in the semi-autobiographical chapters which recur in many of his novels; though it has been stated that he changed his name to Bell by deed poll around 1930, this seems not actually to have happened. At least one posthumous volume is copyrighted "Mrs Stephen Southwald". Though he also wrote ...
Captive Women
Film (1952; vt 3000 AD UK; vt 1,000 Years from Now). American Pictures/RKO Radio Pictures Inc. Produced by Jack Pollexfen, Aubrey Wiseberg and Albert Zugsmith. Directed by Stuart Gilmore. Written by Pollexfen and Wiseberg. Special effects by Irving Block. Cast includes Robert Clarke, Margaret Field, Stuart Randall, Ron Randell, Gloria Saunders and William Schallert. 64 minutes. Black and white. / Long after nuclear World War Three, ...
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 ...