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Sunday 26 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 ...
Measday, Stephen
(1950- ) Australian author and scriptwriter for various media, most significantly for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, his Television including The Time Game (1993), which he novelized as his first tale of sf interest, The Time Game (1993). The News on Aliens (1997), part of the otherwise nonfantastic Rick Street Roving Reporter sequence, deals with the discovery of ...
Swann, Thomas Burnett
(1928-1976) US poet, author and academic who taught English literature at Florida Atlantic University, turning to full-time writing in the early 1960s. As an academic he published works on the poet HD (Hilda Doolittle [1886-1961]) and others, including Wonder and Whimsy: The Fantastic World of Christina Rossetti (1960). Much of his fiction – beginning with "Winged Victory" for Fantastic Universe in 1958 – could be described as ...
Reed, Carmen
(? -? ) US author in whose Earth's Empress and Victoria: A Romance of Two Queenly Souls and of a Revolt in Africa Against a Benign Government (1901) two narrative strands, perhaps unconvincingly, intertwine: a lightly fictionalized dramatization of the Boer War (1899-1902) and a Lost World tale set in the mid-Atlantic, where a Utopian civilization has adapted to life ...
Fontenelle, Bernard le Bovyer de
(1657-1757) French man of letters whose work pointed forward to the Age of Reason; nephew of the dramatist Pierre Corneille (1606-1684). He wrote much, and one of his most important books became a seminal influence on Proto SF: Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes habités (1686; exp 1687; trans Sir W D Knight as A Discourse on the Plurality of Worlds 1687; new trans Aphra Behn as ...
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 ...