SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Sunday 26 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 ...
Theosophy
The Theosophical Society is an occult organization founded in 1875 by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831-1891) and two colleagues; it continues to exist, though in a state of schism. The doctrines propounded by this crypto-religion – theosophy means, literally, "knowledge of God" – have a relationship to Fantastika similar to that of nineteenth-century spiritualism in general, though the cosmological narrative embedded in the basic concepts comprises a ...
Goldston, Robert C
(1927-1982) US author of crime fiction, also under the pseudonym James Stark; of fantasies such as his first novel, The Eighth Day (1956), dealing with miracles in a religious context; and of The Shore Dimly Seen (1963), in which the passengers and crew of a yacht at sea apprehend a nuclear Holocaust from a distance as they approach a seemingly deserted America. / This author should not be confused with the artist James Stark who ...
Thompson, Trudy
(? - ) US author of the romantic Planetary Romance Prisoner of Passion (1995), set in the Far Future of a planet that may be Earth, now a world that has been divided into three portions by the Ancient Ones. There are some resemblance to E R Eddison's The Worm Ouroboros (1922). Hostage Hearts (2006) is a romantic ...
Space Habitats
The space habitat is a natural development from the concept of the manned Space Station (which see). Inevitably there is considerable overlap, with a broad and fuzzy dividing line between space stations which are primarily seen as way-stations or scientific observation posts, and space habitats whose occupants have come to regard them as home. J D Bernal's The World, the Flesh and the Devil (1929 chap) proposed ...
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 ...