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 24 January 2025
Sponsor of the day: Joe Haldeman
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 ...
Leech Woman, The
US film (1960; vt Leech). Universal-International Pictures. Produced by Joseph Gershenson, Direct by Edward Dein. Written by David Duncan from a story by Ben Pivar and Frances Rosenwald. Cast includes Coleen Gray, Kim Hamilton, Estelle Hemsley, Gloria Talbott, Phillip Terry and Grant Williams. 77 minutes. Black and white. / Unscrupulous endocrinologist Dr Paul Talbott (Terry) is in a failing marriage with older wife June (Gray), and plans to ...
Cole, Robert W
(1869-1937) UK photographer (having changed his mind after studying law at Balliol, Oxford, with a view to becoming a barrister) and author who was active during the first decade of the twentieth century. His first and best novel, The Struggle for Empire: A Story of the Year 2236 (1900), takes the Future War story to its logical, grim conclusion. The Anglo-Saxon Federation – ostensibly a Utopia with ...
Wolff, Jake
(? - ) US author whose first novel, The History of Living Forever (2019), focuses on the dance of revelations that beset and illumine the forty-year-old protagonist Conrad's understanding of his romance as a teenager with his chemistry teacher Sam, who had been searching for a recipe, possibly alchemical, that might contain the secret of Immortality. Conrad's search for various meanings – the mystery of ...
Droid
Term first coined by Mari Wolf in Robots of the World! Arise! (July 1952 If; 2010 ebook), and subsequently used by George Lucas in his script for Star Wars (1977); now widely recognized owing to the film's enormous popularity. Though obviously a contraction of Android, it denotes a not necessarily humanoid ...
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 ...