SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Thursday 23 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 ...
Halliday, Mags L
Working name of (apparently) Liz Halliday (1971- ), used because another author with a similar name – Liz Holliday – has also contributed work to the Doctor Who universe. Halliday's Tie, Doctor Who: History 101 (2002), in the Doctor Who: New Adventures subset, features the presence of Eric Blair (George Orwell) in the Spanish Civil War, where surreal displacements between ...
Little Joe
Austrian/German/UK film (2019). Magnolia Pictures / Coop99 / Essential Filmproduktion / The Bureau / Arte / BBC Films / BFI. Directed by Jessica Hausner. Written by Jessica Hausner and Geraldine Bajard. Cast includes Emily Beecham, Kit Connor, Kerry Fox and Ben Whishaw. 105 minutes. Colour / Plant breeder Alice (Beecham), working for a laboratory that creates new strains of plants for commercial use (see ...
Arts
By virtue of its nature, sf has one foot firmly set in each of C P Snow's "two cultures", and sf stories occasionally exhibit an exaggerated awareness of that divide. Charles L Harness's notable novella "The Rose" (March 1953 Authentic) takes the reconciliation of an assumed antagonism between art and science as its theme, the author adopting the view that the emotional richness of art is necessary to temper ...
Lyons, Joseph
(1847-1917) UK inventor, caterer (founder of Lyons Corner Houses), and author of The Master Crime (1907) with Cecil Raleigh, a Near Future tale involving an anarchist destabilization of Britain, causing the Bank of England to close its doors. Lyons was knighted in 1911. [JC]
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 ...