SF Encyclopedia Home Page
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 ...
Starburst
UK monthly nonfiction Media Magazine about sf, fantasy and horror, primarily in Cinema and Television. Small-Bedsheet slick format. Founded January 1978, first published by Starburst Magazines, London, edited by Dez Skinn, but soon taken over by Marvel Comics and edited Alan Mackenzie until #77 (January 1985), then by Roger P Birchall to ...
Tilson, Jake
(1958- ) UK artist, graphic designer and author whose early work reflects various influences, including punk rock and underground Comics, perhaps primarily 2000 AD. Some of the graphic artists and painters who contributed to and/or influenced New Worlds in the 1960s may as well helped inspire Tilson's use of sf narrative motifs and image clusters in the creation of his "xerox books". ...
Golden, Christopher
(1967- ) US author, prolific and successful for his many fantasy and horror novels, who is given an entry here mainly for some sf Ties published early in his career. Some of his horror evokes Horror in SF tonalities, like Snowblind (2014), in which a "Great Storm" feels almost planetary in its violence and implications, though the story itself is a classic Answered Prayer tale [see The ...
LaHaye, Tim
(1926-2016) US evangelical minister, "prophecy scholar" and author with Jerry B Jenkins of the thirteen-book Left Behind sequence which depicts the Holocaust that ravages the world in terms of fundamentalist beliefs in the Rapture which precedes/accompanies the Second Coming of Christ. The series is not normally (or properly) read as sf, as the Godgame implications of the story arc take it far beyond ...
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 ...