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Wednesday 22 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.
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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 ...
Benét, Stephen Vincent
(1898-1943) US author, active from before 1915, very briefly involved in World War One until his myopia was discovered; brother of William Rose Benét. He was initially most noted for his moderately copious Poetry, including an Arabian fantasy, The Drug-Shop; Or, Endymion in Edmonstoun (1917 chap). The earliest examples of poems with direct sf interest are probably "Winged ...
Keverne, Richard
Pseudonym of UK journalist and author Clifford James Wheeler Hosken (1882-1950), in active service during World War One, who wrote detective novels between 1926 and 1944, mostly as by Keverne, though occasionally under his own name; he was the first cousin of William Henry Martin Hosken, who wrote mostly as by Wyndham Martyn. Of some sf interest for its modest use of Scientific Romance ...
Trust and Betrayal: The Legacy of Siboot
Videogame (1987). Designed by Chris Crawford. Platforms: Mac. / Siboot is a rare example of an attempt to make use of emergent narrative techniques in a Videogame (see Interactive Narrative). The player takes the part of an Alien religious acolyte competing against a number of other ...
Smith, George O
(1911-1981) US electronics engineer and author, most active and prominent in the 1940s in Astounding Science-Fiction, in which his first story, "QRM – Interplanetary", appeared in October 1942: the tale both began his sf career and initiated his most famous endeavour, the Venus Equilateral Series of stories (all in Astounding except for one late addition) about a ...
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 ...