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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.
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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 ...
Beyond Fantasy Fiction
US Digest-size magazine. Ten issues, July 1953-January 1955, published by Galaxy Publishing Corporation and edited by H L Gold. The first eight issues were bimonthly and dated; the last two, undated, were titled Beyond Fiction. A companion magazine to Galaxy Science Fiction, Beyond was a fantasy magazine conceived in the same spirit as Unknown (to which Gold had ...
Repo Man
Film (1984). Edge City Productions/Universal. Written and directed by Alex Cox. Cast includes Olivia Barash, Emilio Estevez, Harry Dean Stanton and Tracey Walter. 92 minutes. Colour. / Set in the seedier areas of Los Angeles (see California), this independent, low-budget, semi-surreal film concerns a young man (Estevez) who gets a job as a repo man – a repossessor of unpaid-for cars; his mentor (Stanton) inculcates a ...
Waller, Robert
(1913-2005) UK editor, environmentalist, radio producer, poet and author, active from the 1930s. He is of some sf interest for Shadow of Authority (1956), a Near Future Satire set in a 1980 Britain, where the National Publishing authority (whose internal structure resembles that of the BBC) controls what may be read. His early and troubled interest in the Ecology of an endangered Earth marked ...
Bagnall, R D
(1945- ) UK research chemist, in which field he has published several papers; his one work of fiction, The Fourth Connection (coll of linked stories 1975), presents a series of dramatized speculations on the fourth Dimension, and describes the scientific community's response to the challenges opened up. [JC]
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 ...