SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Sunday 19 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 ...
Swann, Thomas Burnett
(1928-1976) US poet, author and academic who taught English literature at Florida Atlantic University, turning to full-time writing in the early 1960s. As an academic he published works on the poet HD (Hilda Doolittle [1886-1961]) and others, including Wonder and Whimsy: The Fantastic World of Christina Rossetti (1960). Much of his fiction – beginning with "Winged Victory" for Fantastic Universe in 1958 – could be described as ...
Ruditis, Paul
(? - ) US author, mostly of Ties to Television or Comics series, beginning with Which Way Did She Go? (2001) for the vast Sabrina the Teenage Witch reboot beginning in 2000; other ties include one for the Star Trek universe, Star Trek: Enterprise: Shockwave (2002), one for ...
Good Place, The
US tv series (2016-2020). Fremulon, 3 Arts Entertainment, Universal Television. Created by Michael Schur. Directors include Dean Holland, Beth McCarthy-Miller and Morgan Sackett. Writers include Megan Amram, Joe Mande, Michael Schur and Jen Statsky. Cast includes Kristen Bell, D'Arcy Carden, Ted Danson, William Jackson Harper, Manny Jacinto, Marc Evan Jackson, Jameela Jamil and Maya Rudolph. 52 episodes – each of 22 minutes save for the double-length series finale – plus six ...
Rafcam, Nal
(? - ) Undoubtedly pseudonymous author – backwards this name reads MacFarlan – of the imaginatively unremarkable sf novel The Troglodytes, or Dwellers of the Deep (1961; vt The Troglodytes 1962). The eponymous Lost Race of Aliens is discovered under Antarctica as they come to the surface in a misguided attempt to stop nuclear testing (see ...
Clute, John
(1940- ) Canadian critic, editor and author, in the UK from 1969; married to Judith Clute from 1964, partner of Elizabeth Hand since 1996. He began to publish work of genre interest with an sf-tinged poem "Carcajou Lament" in Triquarterly for Winter 1960 [ie Autumn 1959]; he began consistently publishing sf reviews in his "New Fiction" column for the Toronto Star (1966-1967), and later in ...