SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Saturday 25 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
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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 ...
Zhao, Xiran Jay
(1997- ) Chinese-born author, in Canada from about the age of ten; they are of sf interest for the Iron Widow sequence beginning with the Young Adult Iron Widow (2021), where visual topoi from Anime enliven with deliberately garish exuberance an otherwise downbeat narrative. In a long fight against Mecha bent on ...
Darvill-Evans, Peter
(1954- ) UK author and editor, involved in the Games world from about 1976, initiating his writing career with three Fighting Fantasy Ties beginning with Fighting Fantasy Gamebook 25: Beneath Nightmare Castle (1987). He is best-known for his creating for Virgin Books and editing the New Adventures sub-sequence of the overall ...
Madsen, Axel
(1930-2007) Danish-born journalist and author, in Canada from 1956 and in US from the 1960s; best-known for his biographies, whose subjects included John Jacob Astor and Simone de Beauvoir. Of sf interest is Unisave (1980), in which the Overpopulation crisis has created a Dystopian world. [JC]
Leyton, E K
A House Name of the London publishing imprint W H Allen/Star, used for reprinted novelizations of classic Universal horror films – two by Ramsey Campbell and one by Walter Harris – previously published in the USA under the Berkley Medallion house name Carl Dreadstone. [DRL]
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 ...