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Tuesday 21 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 ...
Carpenter, Elmer J
(1907-1988) US author in whose Moonspin (1967) a foreign power gains control of Earth's weather, threatening to freeze the planet (see Climate Change; Weather Control); but a fight-back effort by Scientists on the Moon may save the day. An earlier novel, Nile Fever (1959), is not sf. [JC]
Man Made Monster
US film (1941; vt Atomic Monster). Universal Pictures. Associate Producer Jack Bernhard. Directed by George Waggner. Written by Waggner from the story "The Electric Man" by Harry Essex (credited as H J Essex), Sid Schwartz and Len Golos. Cast includes Frank Albertson, Lionel Atwill, Lon Chaney Jr, Samuel S Hinds and Anne Nagel. 59 minutes. Black and white. / "Big" Dan McCormick (Chaney) – a carnival sideshow performer as Dynamo Dan, the Electric Man – survives a ...
Kelly, William Patrick
(1848-1915) Irish soldier and author, mostly in the UK, in whose Doctor Baxter's Invention (1912) it proves possible to transfer insanity and homicidal behaviour from one person to another via a serum taken from the blood of a homicidal maniac (see Identity Transfer; Medicine). The Harrington Street Mystery (1915), a detective story, features an electro-magnetic Weapon. ...
Mason, Zachary
(1974- ) US computer scientist and author whose first novel, The Lost Books of the Odyssey (2007; rev 2010), though it may be read simplistically as a literary fantasia on Homer's Odyssey, successfully invokes the telling literalism of Fantastika in its rewriting of various episodes of the original in more or less Alternate World terms. Some of the ...
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 ...