SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Monday 20 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 17 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 ...
Koster, Raph
(1971- ) US Game designer who has primarily worked on persistent Online Worlds. Koster's first major contributions were made to the free-to-play Heroic Fantasy Multi User Dungeon LegendMUD (1994 Mainframe, Net), of which he was one of the designers. He was later hired as lead designer for Ultima Online (1997), ...
Marcus, Ben
(1967- ) US author whose work has from the first explored with exuberant gonzo ambitiousness a wide range of Postmodernist story-telling strategies (see Equipoise; Postmodernism and SF), generally creating through disjunct or colliding topoi an anatomy of modern America far beyond the range of mimetic fiction as that form continues occasionally to be written in the twenty-first century (see ...
Barnes, Myra Edwards
(1933- ) US author of Linguistics and Language in Science Fiction-Fantasy (1975), a reprint of her 1971 PhD dissertation. This is a useful introduction to the subject (see Linguistics), although not as comprehensive as Aliens and Linguists: Language Study and Science Fiction (1980) by Walter E Meyers. [PN]
Time Radio
Term used by this encyclopedia for specialized Time Machines which allow information to be sent, without gross physical interaction, from the future to the past. (The reverse may also be possible but generally lacks sf interest: unless worldwide Holocaust or a sizeable Time Abyss has intervened, physical records – from paper to fossils – will normally suffice to transmit information from ...
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 ...