SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Thursday 23 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 ...
Garnett, Edward
(1868-1937) publisher's reader, journalist, playwright and author, well known in the first capacity for his early advocacy of many writers who would become famous, those with entries in this encyclopedia including Joseph Conrad, E M Forster and W H Hudson; son of the librarian and author Richard Garnett, husband of the translator Constance Garnett (1862-1946), ...
World SF
1. An international association of sf professionals (not only authors, but also artists, critics, editors, agents, publishers, etc.), founded in Dublin, September 1976, by professionals at the First World Science Fiction Writers' Conference, and coming into operation as of the 1978 Dublin meeting. World SF's stated aim was "the general dissemination of creative sf, the furthering of scholarship, the interchange of ideas ... the fostering of closer bonds between those who already hold ...
Children in SF
In his essay "The Embarrassments of Science Fiction" (in Science Fiction at Large ed Peter Nicholls anth 1976; vt Explorations of the Marvellous 1978) Thomas M Disch asserts, tongue only partly in cheek, that sf is a branch of children's literature – because most lovers of the genre begin reading it in their early teens, and because many sf stories are about children. Whether or not ...
Naylor, Charles
(1941-2005) US editor and author, the partner of Thomas M Disch between 1969 and 2005. He wrote a gothic novel, Steps to the Grotto (1974) as by Cassandra Nye, echoing the Cassandra Knye pseudonym used earlier for gothics by Disch and John T Sladek. Under his own name, Neighboring Lives (1981) with Thomas M Disch is a non-sf ...
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 ...