SF Encyclopedia Home Page
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 ...
Worlds in Balance
Settings created for sf Games have some unique characteristics not shared with other science-fictional worlds. Most importantly, a gameworld must be balanced, meaning that opposing forces must be of approximately equal capabilities. While this may also be a requirement for an entertaining adventure story, in which the protagonist is engaged in conflict with a reasonable chance of either victory or defeat, games are much more demanding in this regard. Characters in ...
Iron Giant, The
Animated film (1999). Warner Bros presents a Brad Bird film. Directed by Brad Bird. Written by Tim McCanlies, from a story by Brad Bird based on The Iron Man (1968; vt The Iron Giant 1968), a prose work by the poet (and British Poet Laureate for fourteen years) Ted Hughes. 87 minutes. Colour. / In 1957, a huge man of iron crashes from space near the small American town of Rockwell, Maine. While searching for metal to ...
Randisi, Robert J
(1951-2024) US author, almost exclusively of nonfantastic thrillers and Westerns, more than 500 of the latter as by J R Roberts in his Clint Adams – The Gunsmith series, which did included the marginal Sasquatch Hunt (1983),in which Bigfoot is treated as a Monster. Sf was not central to his work or his wide influence in his chosen fields. He collaborated with Warren Murphy on ...
Earthworm Jim
US animated tv series (1995-1996). AKOM, Flextech Television Limited, Universal Animation Studios. Created by Doug TenNapel, based on the 1994 platform game (see Videogames) of the same name. Directors include Pam Garry, Graham Morris, Sue Peters and Bill Reed. Most episodes written by Doug Langdale. Voice cast includes Charlie Adler, Jeff Bennett, Dan Castellaneta, Jim Cummings, Edward Hibbert, Andrea Martin and Kath Soucie. Twenty-three 21 minute episodes. ...
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 ...