SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Friday 17 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
Sponsor of the day: John Howard
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 ...
Harrison, Jordan
(1977- ) US filmmaker and playwright active from around 2005; as with many contemporary dramatists, his works tend to juxtapose various non-mimetic topoi (see Fantastika) into sometimes jangly narrative conveyances, but with very considerable energy. In his second play, Kid-Simple: A Radio Play in the Flesh (performed 2002; 2004 chap), a young woman's Invention – a device that can hear what ...
Keene, Day
Pseudonym of US author Gunnar Hjerstedt (1904-1969), mostly of detective novels and film and television scripts. In his sf novel, World without Women (1960) with Leonard Pruyn, the few remaining women find themselves in Dystopian circumstances (see Women in SF), though it is (unusually) the men who are most often punished for violating scarcity taboos. [JC]
Villains and Vigilantes
Role Playing Game (1979). Fantasy Games Unlimited (FGU). Designed by Jeff Dee, Jack Herman. / Villains and Vigilantes was the most popular of the early Superhero themed RPGs, despite its inclusion of several design features that now seem questionable. Notably, characters are assigned a random assortment of Superpowers, making it ...
Memoirs of a Survivor
Film (1981). Memorial Films/National Film Finance Corporation/EMI. Directed by David Gladwell. Written by Kerry Crabbe, Gladwell, based on The Memoirs of a Survivor (1974) by Doris Lessing. Cast includes Julie Christie, Christopher Guard, Debbie Hutchings and Leonie Mellinger. 115 minutes. Colour. / Amid Near-Future scenes of urban squalor in Western London a middle-aged woman (Christie) observes (mostly ...
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 ...