SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Friday 24 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 20 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 ...
Arts
By virtue of its nature, sf has one foot firmly set in each of C P Snow's "two cultures", and sf stories occasionally exhibit an exaggerated awareness of that divide. Charles L Harness's notable novella "The Rose" (March 1953 Authentic) takes the reconciliation of an assumed antagonism between art and science as its theme, the author adopting the view that the emotional richness of art is necessary to temper ...
Haarsma, P J
(1964- ) Canadian-born film and television producer whose Softwire sequence, beginning with The Softwire: Virus on Orbis 1 (2006) and ending with The Softwire: Awakening on Orbis 4 (2010), follows the Young Adult experiences of a "softwire" – a human capable of interaction with various forms of information-saturated Technology – in a ...
Gilstrap, John
(1957- ) US screenwriter and author, mostly of nonfantastic thrillers, including the long Jonathan Grave sequence beginning with No Mercy (2009) [series not listed below]. He is of sf interest for the first instalment of the projected Virginia Emerson sequence, Crimson Phoenix (2021), which provides at first a Technothriller-inflected conspectus of ...
Mori Hiroshi
(1957- ) Prolific Japanese author and model-maker, who gave up youthful Manga illustration under the name Mori Muku to specialize in rheology (the flow of viscous plastics). He became an associate professor in engineering at Nagoya University before quitting in 2005 to become a full-time author of prose fiction. Mori is largely known as a thriller writer in Japan, usually with scientific themes recalling the detective ...
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 ...