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.
Site updated on 17 January 2025
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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 ...
Reit, Seymour
(1918-2001) US author, well known for having sold to Paramount Studios for $200 all rights to his unpublished story, "The Friendly Ghost"; the Caspar the Friendly Ghost cartoon series made vast sums for its owners. Much of his work, in various genres, fiction and nonfiction, was written for younger children and latterly for the Young Adult market. In Benvenuto (1974), one of his rare fantasies, a boy brings home a dragon (see ...
Pérochon, Ernest
(1885-1942) French author who served at the beginning of World War One before suffering a heart attack and being invalided out; most of his work was nonfantastic; he won the Prix Goncourt in 1920. His sf novel, Les Hommes Frénétiques (1925; trans Brian Stableford as The Frenetic People 2012), describes a Utopian Western world which after a century or ...
O'Donnell, Peter
(1920-2010) UK Comics writer and author who entered the comics field in 1936, his work being usually nonfantastic, although he wrote a number of notable scripts from 1953 to 1966 for the Science Fantasy strip Garth. He is of particular sf interest for Modesty Blaise, a newspaper strip which ran in the London Evening Standard from 13 May 1963 until 11 April 2001, when he retired; this was ...
Todorov, Tzvetan
(1939-2017) Bulgarian literary critic, in France from 1963; he pursued his postgraduate studies in Paris under the direction of the semiotic philosopher Roland Barthes (1915-1980). Among Todorov's several books and essays on structuralist criticism, all written in French, Introduction à la littérature fantastique (1970; trans Richard Howard as The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to Literary Genre 1973; US paperback 1975 with intro by Robert ...
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 ...