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 ...
Oppenheim, E Phillips
(1866-1946) UK author, publishing at least 160 novels from 1887 until just before his death, some as by Anthony Partridge; most of them are tales of espionage or society detective mysteries, the best known being The Great Impersonation (February-July 1919 The Grand Magazine; 1920), a non-fantastic thriller. His sf novels of interest – several of the titles given in the Checklist below are romantic-fantasy potboilers, some with Ruritanian ...
Palmer, Raymond A
(1910-1977) US author and editor. His childhood was plagued by serious accidents including one that crushed his spine: in adulthood, as a consequence, he stood less than five feet tall and was hunchbacked, though he never allowed physical stress to affect his career. He was an active sf fan from the late 1920s, together with Walter Dennis creating the Science Correspondence Club (or SCC) in early 1929 with the express purpose of uniting the growing number of small local science/sf fan clubs ...
Burger, Dionys
Anglicized form of the name of Dutch physicist, lecturer and author Dionijs Burger (1892-1987). His Bolland: Een roman van gekromde ruimten en uitdijend heelal (1957; trans Cornelia J Rheinboldt as Sphereland: A Fantasy about Curved Spaces and an Expanding Universe 1965) is a Mathematical fable written as a sequel to Flatland (1884) by Edwin A Abbott. As indicated in the subtitle, Burger ...
Beauman, Ned
(1985- ) UK author whose first novel, Boxer, Beetle (2010), is an exuberantly gonzo demonstration of nonfantastic ludic fiction (see Johan Huizinga), with rule-governed structural plays and clashes of narrative modes, with a focus on 1930s Berlin, Eugenics, modernist music, entomology and boxing. His second novel, The Teleportation Accident (2012), introduces sf topoi and into a ...
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 ...