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 ...
Piserchia, Doris
(1928-2021) US author, born and raised in West Virginia, in the US Navy 1950-1954. She began publishing short fiction with "Rocket to Gehenna" for Fantastic in September 1966. Her first novel, the remarkable and densely plotted van Vogt-style revenge drama Mister Justice (1973 dos), appeared after she had established some reputation in shorter forms, one of her stories being included in ...
Stevens, Isaac N
(1858-1920) US lawyer and author of The Liberators: A Story of Future American Politics (1908), in which two young men – an idealist who derives his passion for justice from the example of Abraham Lincoln, and his enormously wealthy friend – work to transform a Near Future America into a land where all will be treated with fairness; all Transportation companies, and other potential trusts, are ...
Banks, Michael A
Pseudonym of US author and editor Alan Gould (1951-2023), long active in Cincinnati Fandom, who began publishing sf as Banks with "Lost & Found" with George Wagner in Asimov's for March/April 1978, and who has since published at least forty-five stories, some as Alan Gould. His first books of sf interest were the nonfiction Understanding Science Fiction (1982), a primer with examples – mostly his own stories – ...
Pancras, PJ
Working name of Pamela Pancras (1966- ) and Jeroen Pancras (1969- ), a Dutch couple of genre interest for their Planet Paradroid series, projected as a trilogy, although with the publication of the prequel novella Death Space (2019), this appears to already be approaching at least four parts. / The namesake first volume, Planet Paradroid (2015; trans Grayson Bray Morris 2017) was published in Dutch as by ...
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 ...