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
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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 ...
Sudbanthad, Pitchaya
(? - ) Thailand journalist and author, now partially resident in the US, who began to publish work of genre interest with "The Beginnings of the World" in Eyeshot for May 2003. He is of sf interest for his first novel, Bangkok Wakes to Rain (2019), a tale, set primarily in Bangkok, whose various narrative threads are separated and conjoined through Reincarnation-like re-embodiments of significant ...
Robots [performance]
Performance (2009). Produced by Le Voyage Extraordinaire. Directed and conceived by Christian Denisart. Set design by Gilbert Maire; costume design by Cécile Collet; music by Lee Maddeford; choreography by Corinne Rochet and Nicholas Pettit. Cast includes Laurence Iseli and Branch Worsham. / Robots is an amalgam of dramatic musical performance and dance Theatre. The production premiered on 1 May 2009 at the Théâtre Barnabe in ...
Radin, Max
(1880-1950) Polish-born academic and author, in US from early childhood; of sf interest is The Day of Reckoning (1943), a Near Future tale in which the Nazis have lost World War Two and Hitler (along with his main subordinates) are put on trial for war crimes. Though roughly similar to Michael Foot's The Trial of Mussolini (1943), Radin's book focuses more strongly on ...
Penrose, Roger
(1931- ) UK mathematical physicist, Emeritus Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford, who has achieved much significant work in his field. Occasional forays into recreational Mathematics include the creation, with his geneticist father Lionel Penrose (1898-1972), of the impossible ever-ascending or ever-descending Penrose staircase described in their paper "Impossible Objects: A Special Type of Visual Illusion" ...
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 ...