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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 ...
Greene, Joseph
(1914-1990) US author, editor and author for Comics from the late 1930s, scripting various series, including (it has been claimed) various DC Comics Superhero productions such as Superman and Wonder Woman; much of his work was either anonymous, or under variations of his own name or pseudonyms such as Joe Green, Joseph Lawrence, ...
Gafla, Ofir Touché
(1968- ) Israeli author whose first novel, Olam Hasof (2004; trans Mitch Ginsburg as The World of the End 2013), begins as an Afterlife fantasy (for Afterlife see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below), with the protagonist's Suicide, which he figures will reunite him with his beloved dead wife. The various worlds into ...
Szilárd, Leó
(1898-1964) Hungarian-born physicist and author, in the USA from 1937, whose The Voice of the Dolphins and Other Stories (coll 1961) was published late in his celebrated career as a nuclear physicist who had been involved in the creation of the Manhattan Project. Several of these sf stories were written in the 1940s; one of these, "My Trial as a War Criminal" (Fall 1949 University of Chicago Law Review), is an early expression of the deep and often hidden fears of the ...
Ellis, Edward S
(1840-1916) US teacher, editor and author of boys' books, popular history, miscellaneous work and a very large number of US dime novels, mainly Westerns, under his own name and many pseudonyms. His enormous bibliography, though studied exhaustively by Denis Rogers (in various issues of Dime Novel Round-Up), remains unsettled. Ellis established the dime novel as a commercial field with Seth Jones (1860), and instigated ...
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 ...