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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 ...
Schomburg, Alex
(1905-1998) US illustrator and Comic-book artist; he occasionally spelled his name Schomberg, and in his early career sometimes signed his work as Xela. His first assignment was for Hugo Gernsback in 1925; he did his first cover in that year for Science and Invention. During his 65-year career, which extended into the 1980s with covers for ...
Crow, Martha Foote
(1854-1924) US poet and author of The World Above: A Duologue (1905 chap), a short play of interest for its depiction of an Underground Dystopian Pocket Universe, from which the two protagonists escape, upwards into the surface world. [JC]
Blackburn, John
(1923-1993) UK antiquarian book dealer and author, in many of whose novels a powerful ambience of Horror derives from a calculated use of material from several genres, including sf, often simultaneously; he was a sophisticated, commercial exploiter of Equipoise in fantastic fiction. The loose General Kirk sequence beginning with A Scent of New-Mown Hay (1958; vt The Reluctant Spy 1966), ...
Williams, John A
(1925-2015) US academic, poet and author, almost all of whose work reflected his experiences (including service in World War Two) as a Black American. His sf (see Race in SF) is similarly focused. The Man Who Cried I Am (1967) posits a Black genocide plot on the part of the American Government, known as the King Alfred Plan and to be put into action – beginning with mass transfer of Black people into ...
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 ...