SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Sunday 19 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 17 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 ...
Survivalist Fiction
During the near-half century of Cold War after the dropping of the atom bomb on Japan in 1945, nuclear Holocausts were a commonplace plot device in various genres of popular fiction. Some novels took readers teasingly up to the brink without actually carrying them into the terminal moments; Cold War thrillers of this sort are not generally treated in this encyclopedia. A rather larger number of novels treated the final war as a given, ...
Castro, Adam-Troy
(1960- ) US author who began publishing work of genre interest with "Clearance to Land" for Pulphouse: The Hardback Magazine #5, Fall 1989, and much of whose subsequent work for some years was Horror, though he has published Print On Demand collections which include sf, and Tangled Strings (coll 2004), which incorporates two tales from his AIsource Infection ...
Ognibene, Peter J
(1941- ) US former airforce officer, aerospace engineer and author whose Technothriller, The Big Byte (1984), presciently addresses the vulnerability of the world banking system when terrorists create a planetary domino effect by gumming up the works in one location. [JC]
Dream Hacking
Term used in this encyclopedia for the now frequent sf trope in which entry is made into someone's personal dreams or mental landscape (as though this literal Inner Space were a physical geography or Pocket Universe) to study or influence the contents. This has long been imagined as an intriguing technique of future Psychology. / A pioneering sf example is Peter ...
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 ...