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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 ...
Goonan, Kathleen Ann
(1952-2021) US author who began publishing work of genre interest with "Wanting to Talk to You" for Asimovs in 1991; a Round-Robin story, "The Darcy Bee" (February 1998 Omni Online) with John Clute, Elizabeth Hand, Jonathan Lethem and Kim Newman, has been dated 1988 in error: it is not her ...
Day, Oscar F G
(1860-1949) US journalist, song-writer and author of a Lost Race novel, The Devil's Gold: The Story of a Forgotten Race (1892), in which a vast statue of Satan cast in virgin gold is found under the mountains of Oregon; its discovery exposes an anti-Feminist pastoral society flourishing in a hidden valley, which is helped to survive through strict limits on population growth. [JC]
Cybernetics
In sf Terminology this is a word so often misused that its real meaning is in danger of being devalued or forgotten. / The term "cybernetics", derived from a Greek word meaning helmsman or controller, was coined by the distinguished mathematician Norbert Wiener in 1947 to describe a new science on which he and others had been working since 1942. The word first passed into general usage with the publication of his ...
Chambers, Whitman
(1896-1968) US screenwriter and author, active from about 1923, most of whose novels were Westerns or detective fiction; his Near Future sf tract, Invasion! (1943), is a Yellow Peril tale set in a World War Two Los Angeles (see California) invaded (see Invasion) by a Japanese expeditionary force ...
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 ...