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 ...
Superman
In the same way that theories of Evolution provide an imaginative context for sf stories about the Origin of Man and Life on Other Worlds, so they govern attitudes to superhumans. There is a significant difference, though, between Darwin-inspired images of a "fitter" species and images inspired by Lamarckian and Bergsonian ideas of "creative evolution", in which the emergence of a superman ...
Ad Astra [film]
Film (2019). New Regency Pictures, Bona Film Group, Keep Your Head. Directed by James Gray. Written by Gray and Ethen Gross. Cast includes Loren Dean, Tommy Lee Jones, Ruth Negga, Brad Pitt, Donald Sutherland, Liv Tyler. 123 minutes. Colour. / Several decades into an undated Near Future, the US Space Command sends po-faced Major Roy McBride (Pitt) to Mars on an urgent mission to attempt to communicate at long-distance with his ...
Counter-Earth
An imagined extra planet of our own solar system, supposedly sharing Earth's orbit but always concealed from observation by its position on the far side of the Sun (that is, at or near the L3 Lagrange Point of the Earth-Sun system). The concept is ancient: Pythagoras proposed both the world, which he called Antichthon, and the mechanism of its concealment in the fifth century BCE. Although Counter-Earth – or ...
Silent, William T
Pseudonym of US author John William Jackson Jr (1945- ), author of Lord of the Red Sun (1972), which begins as a Space Opera but becomes a Planetary Romance. [JC]
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 ...