SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 21 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 ...
Ponson du Terrail, Pierre-Alexis
(1829-1871) French author, mostly of popular fiction, best known for the character Rocambole, an Antihero who prefigures many similar adventurers who begin their careers as criminals and end up working, usually in secret, to defend society, a list which includes Maurice LeBlanc's Arsène Lupin, Doc Savage, Leslie Charteris's The Saint, and others; ...
Sword, The
US rock band formed in Austin, Texas in 2004, active until 2022. Initially lumped in with stoner rock bands of the period, by the time of their concept album Warp Riders (2010) they had moved in a more traditional heavy metal direction. This spirited but somewhat unvarying record, with good riffs and monotonous vocals, is set on the fictional planet Acheron, and tells of the archer Ereth, who is banished from his tribe, discovers a mysterious orb, meets various archetypal figures ...
Acton, Harold
(1904-1994) Italian-born UK editor, translator and author, much of his life spent in the land of his birth; best known for highly civilized reflections, in books like Memoirs of an Aesthete (1948), on his own style of life. A period in China during the 1930s inspired some translation work, including Glue and Lacquer: Four Cautionary Tales (coll 1941), adapted from Hsing Shih Hêng Yen ["Common Tales to Rouse the World"] (coll ...
Namlook, Pete
(1960-2012) Prolific German composer and performer of instrumental electronica. Namlook has released scores and perhaps even hundreds of albums under a wide variety of pseudonyms, and many of them style themselves as sf. Some of the more notable of these releases include The Fires of Ork (1994) and The Fires of Ork Part II (2007, both with Geir Jenssen of Biosphere), an unauthorized sequel-album to ...
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 ...