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 ...
Karta
Pseudonym of Australian author Charles Carter (1871-1951) for his Utopia, The Island of Justice (1901), set on an Island whose teetotal society enjoys a relatively moneyless economy, and electricity-enabled Inventions. [JC]
Airship Boys
In the sf of the late nineteenth century the sky is full of Balloons. Airships – a term which in this encyclopedia embraces all powered lighter-than-air vehicles – serve as forms of advanced Transportation in the Fantastic Voyages of Jules Verne and others, and in visions of progress articulated by authors like Albert ...
Blair, Kate
(? - ) UK-born author, in Canada from 2008. In her first novel, the Equipoisal Young Adult Transferral (2015), a medical solution (see Medicine) designed to deal with all diseases has deeply affected very Near Future London. The solution, to transfer diseases ...
Halsbury, Earl of
Working name and title of UK barrister and author Hardinge Goulburn Giffard (1880-1943), Second Earl of Halsbury; his father, Hardinge Stanley Giffard (1823-1921), the first earl, was British Lord Chancellor for seventeen years at the end of the nineteenth century; Giffard was in active service during World War One. His Future War novel in the form of a Scientific Romance, 1944 ...
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 ...