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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.
Site updated on 20 January 2025
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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 ...
Madách, Imre
(1823-1864) Hungarian playwright and parliamentarian, chiefly known for his verse play Az ember tragédiája (1861; trans Charles Henry Meltzer and Paul Vajdatrans as The Tragedy of Man: A Dramatic Poem in Fifteen Scenes 1933 Hungary; preferred trans George Szirtes 1988 Hungary). This philosophical, rather pessimistic fantasy about the destiny of mankind focuses on Adam (an optimist) and Eve (see ...
Rabin, Staton
(1958- ) US author of two Young Adult novels, Black Powder (2005) and The Curse of the Romanovs (2007), both involving Time Travel: the young protagonist of the first, using his teacher's Invention of a Time Machine, travels back to the thirteenth century in order to deter Roger Bacon ...
Contributors
Contributors to this encyclopedia may be identified by their initials, appearing (along with others if the entry has multiple authors) at the end of the main text for each entry. The first list below links initials to full names. Roughly half of the contributors themselves receive entries in this book, and are listed below with their surnames marked as normal hyperlinks to their entries. Brief descriptions of contributors without entries are incorporated into the list. A second list, further ...
Hastings, George Gordon
(? -? ) US author whose Sleeper Awakes novel, The First American King (1904), carries two protagonists – the more important being a brilliant inventor – by Suspended Animation to the America of 1975. They find it to be a Ruritanian empire assaulted from within by Federated Nihilists, who eventually take power and establish ...
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 ...