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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 ...
Webber, Charles Wilkins
(1819-1856) US journalist and author, mostly of nonfantastic adventure tales, the closest to the Gothic Western being perhaps "Jack Long; Or, the Shot in the Eye" (in Tales of the Southern Border coll 1853), where the eponymous marksman with uncanny accuracy shoots each of his ten tormentors in the eye. Webber is of some sf interest for Yieger's Cabinet: Spiritual Vampirism: The History of Etherial Softdown, and her Friends of the "New Light" (1853), an anti-feminist ...
Thought-Variant
Term introduced by F Orlin Tremaine in the December 1933 issue of Astounding, describing an idea-centred type of story he aimed to include in each issue henceforth. These "thought-variant" stories, as distinct from the action-adventure sf tradition of the Pulp magazine, should each develop an idea that "has been slurred over or passed by in many, many stories". The same issue carried Tremaine's first ...
Craig, Joe
(1981- ) UK singer/songwriter and author of the Jimmy Coates sequence, beginning with Jimmy Coates: Killer (2005; vt Jimmy Coates: Assassin? 2005), a Young Adult novel of some interest for the intensity of its depiction of young Jimmy's dilemma: Genetically Engineered to unfold into a Superman assassin at the age of 18, he finds himself ...
Capobianco, Michael
(1950- ) US author, married until her death to A C Crispin, whose most significant work has been in collaboration with William Barton (whom see for details). His solo novel, Burster (1990), examines the stresses afflicting those aboard a Generation Starship which has left an Earth that was possibly at the brink of destruction. Capobianco was ...
Nicholls, Peter
(1939-2018) Australian editor and author, primarily a critic and historian of sf through his creation and editing of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction [see below]; resident in the UK 1970-1988, in Australia from 1988; worked as an academic in English literature (1962-1968, 1971-1977), scripted television documentaries, was a Harkness Fellow in Film-making (1968-1970) in the USA, worked as a publisher's editor (1982-1983), often broadcast film and book reviews on BBC Radio from 1974 and ...