SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Sunday 19 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 ...
Corkran, Alice
(1856-1916) UK journalist and author, for many years (dates not known) the partner of Richard Whiteing. She is of mild interest for the title story assembled in Mrs Wishing-to-be and Other Stories (coll 1883), in which an implausibly described broomstick-like Spaceship takes the protagonist to the Moon; and for Down the Snow Stairs; Or, From Good-Night to Good-Morning ...
Roddenberry, Gene
(1921-1991) US television scriptwriter, producer, director and creator of Star Trek. Roddenberry began writing in the late 1940s while working as a pilot for a commercial airline. In 1953 he sold his first television script and in 1956 his first that was sf, a genre in which he had not previously been particularly interested. In 1954 he became a full-time television writer. In 1963 he created and produced a series of his own – The Lieutenant – ...
Ōtomo Katsuhiro
(1954- ) Japanese Manga creator and film-maker, who became the most famous Anime director abroad in the early 1990s, largely on the basis of a single film. Like Hayao Miyazaki in the following decade, he occupied an iconic position as the face of the medium, despite conceiving much of his output in reaction to it. His comics debut, not sf, was with "Jūsei" ["Gun Report"] (August ...
Lyttelton, Thomas
(1744-1779) UK politician and author, best known as a libertine, and for his volatile side-changing in Parliament on the subject of the American colonies, as they began to achieve independence. He is of sf interest for the posthumous Poems, by a Young Nobleman ...; Particularly the State of England, and The once flourishing City of London. In a Letter from an American Traveller, Dated from the Ruinous Portico of St Paul's, in the Year 2199 ... [for full title see Checklist] (coll ...
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 ...