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
Sponsor of the day: Joe Haldeman
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 ...
Kohll, Malcolm
(1953- ) South African-born screenwriter and author, in the UK from 1977, whose Tie to his own Doctor Who script, Doctor Who – Delta and the Bannermen (1989) is of the usual competence required in this universe. [JC]
Singularity
A singularity in Mathematics is a point where a graphed equation veers off towards infinity and ceases to give physically useful or meaningful results: hence the singularity point predicted at the heart of a Black Hole by theoretical models which assume the total mass must be compressed by Gravity into an infinitesimal volume whose gravitational attraction at close range approaches infinity. The ...
Merril Collection of Science Fiction, Speculation and Fantasy
Founded in 1970 by Toronto Public Library in Canada, to house a major donation by sf author and anthologist Judith Merril and substantially added to since, mostly during the long successful tenure from 1986 to 2017 of Lorna Toolis as its head; known as the Spaced Out Library until 1 January 1991, and housed from September 1995 in a Special Collections building at 239 College Street in central Toronto, which also holds the ...
Cronin, Bernard
Working name of UK-born author Charles Bernard Cronin (1884-1968), in Australia from 1890; he is better known in sf under the pseudonym Eric North, a byline he used mostly on stories for younger readers; he is also credited with other pseudonyms in other genres, normally using his own name for novels set in rural Australia. However, The Treasure of the Tropics (4 May-26 June 1926 Pals; 1928), a Lost World tale ...
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 ...