SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Saturday 18 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 ...
Hirschman, Edward
(1950- ) Author, presumably US and perhaps pseudonymous, whose Tarzan at Mars' Core (1977) is a weak pastiche of Edgar Rice Burroughs in which a UFO transports Tarzan to what appears to be a Far Future version of Burroughs's Pellucidar set within Mars. This Hollow Earth ...
Fantastic Universe
US Digest-size magazine, last six issues adopted a trimmed Pulp format, though on better quality paper. 69 issues June/July 1953 to March 1960, published by King-Size Publications to July 1959, then by Great American Publications. Fantastic Universe began as a bimonthly, but went monthly in September 1954 and held to that schedule for most of its life except November 1958-September 1959, when it was again bimonthly. ...
Jones, J B
(1810-1866) US author best known for non-fantastic novels like Wild Western Scenes [for subtitle see Checklist] (1841 Baltimore Saturday Visitor; 1841), which did much to establish the literary legend of Daniel Boone (1734-1820), in part through the incorporation of some Tall Tales [see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below] into the narrative. His sf novel, The Border War: A Tale of Disunion ...
Nektar
UK progressive rock band, founded in Hamburg in 1969 and based thereafter in Germany. Their first album, Journey to the Centre of the Eye (1971) spins an only obliquely Verne-like premise in which an astronaut travels to another dimension from which he is able to witness the nuclear destruction of Earth. A Tab in the Ocean (1972) is an incoherently druggy suite of songs, this time premised on the idea of dropping an enormous "tab" of ...
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 ...