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 ...
Redgrove, Peter
(1932-2003) UK poet and author, married to Penelope Shuttle. His first work of sf interest was "Mr Waterman" for Paris Review #29 in 1963, although he contributed occasionally to New Worlds, including a fantasy poem later published as The God-Trap (1966 chap). His first novel, In the Country of the Skin (1973), is a metaphysical fantasy; he remains of sf interest mainly for his later novels, ...
Maturin, Charles R
(1782-1824) Irish author, playwright and clergyman, the son of French Protestants in exile, who wrote several Gothic romances and sensational plays with intermittent success – most notably The Fatal Revenge, or The Family of Montorio (1807 3vols) as by Dennis Jasper Murphy – before the publication of his definitive terror-romance, Melmoth the Wanderer (1820 4vols) anonymous. The eponymous hero, who is reminiscent of figures ...
Dimension X
Radio series (1950-1951). NBC-Radio network. Regular staff writers included Ernest Kinroy (1924-2014), George Lefferts, and Howard Rodman. Narrator: Norman Rose. 50 30-minute episodes. / This was one of the earliest adult sf Radio drama anthology series, and was of reasonably high quality; most instalments were based on published sf stories, although Kinroy and Lefferts contributed several original plays. Dimension X was partnered with ...
Cowper, Richard
Pseudonym of UK author John Middleton Murry Jr (1926-2002), son of the famous critic; Cowper also published four non-sf novels under the name Colin Murry, beginning with The Golden Valley (1958); and, as Colin Middleton Murry – Colin being an early nickname, though he was normally addressed as John – two autobiographical volumes, One Hand Clapping (1975; vt I at the Keyhole 1975), which deals mainly with his relationship with his difficult, ...
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 ...