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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.
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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 ...
O'Neill, Henry J
(1859-1926) Welsh-born lawyer and author, in the US from 1869; his sf novel, The Travels of John Wryland [for full title see Checklist] (1903), is a Fantastic Voyage tale centring on a Lost Race in Tibet, an authoritarian Dystopia viewed with disfavour by Wryland. [JC]
Sherlock Holmes
Arthur Conan Doyle's famous hero Sherlock Holmes (see Icons) was introduced as a scientific detective operating by rigorous logic – but Doyle's master-stroke was to show him through the eyes of his staunch but uncomprehending companion Doctor Watson, providing a human frame for what might have been an arid inspiration. Although Holmes stories did not always fully honour this template description, Holmes himself soon ...
Iceman
Film (1984). Universal. Produced by Norman Jewison. Directed by Fred Schepisi. Written by Chip Proser, John Drimmer, from a story by Drimmer. Cast includes Lindsay Crouse, Timothy Hutton and John Lone. 99 minutes. Colour. / Set in the Arctic (shot in Canada), Iapetus tells of a Neanderthal dug out of the ice, thawed, resuscitated and studied. Eschewing the caveman clichés (see Apes as Human) of films like Trog ...
Eclipse Phase
Role Playing Game (2009). Posthuman Studios. Designed by Rob Boyle, John Snead, Brian Cross, Jack Graham, Lars Blumenstein. / Eclipse Phase is a game of Posthuman terror. The setting is a complexly inhabited solar system after the Fall, a war against rogue AIs which ended only when the enemy escaped to the stars, taking with them millions of forcibly Uploaded ...
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 ...