SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Monday 20 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 ...
Abyss, The
Film (1989). Twentieth Century Fox. Directed by James Cameron. Produced by Gale Anne Hurd. Written by Cameron. Cast includes Michael Biehn, Todd Graff, Ed Harris and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio. 146 minutes. Colour. / Despite the largest budget of the period's fantasies set Under the Sea (see Deepstar Six; Leviathan) at ...
Twilight's Last Gleaming
Film (1977; vt Nuclear Countdown). Geria Productions/Hemdale. Directed by Robert Aldrich. Written by Ronald M Cohen, Edward Huebsch, based on Viper Three by Walter Wager. Cast includes Melvyn Douglas, Charles Durning, Burt Lancaster, Richard Widmark and Paul Winfield. 146 minutes (cut to 122 minutes). Colour. / In this borderline-sf movie, set in 1981, escaped military prisoners headed by a renegade US general take over a nuclear ICBM ...
Full Spectrum
US Original-Anthology series published by Bantam Books since 1988, created by Lou Aronica, five issues: Full Spectrum (anth 1988), edited by Aronica with Shawna McCarthy; Full Spectrum 2 (anth 1989), edited by Aronica with Pat LoBrutto, McCarthy and Amy Stout, Full Spectrum 3 (anth ...
Contact [2]
Russian animated film (1978; original title Kontakt). Soyuzmultfilm. Directed by Vladimir Tarasov. Written by Alexander Kostinsky. 10 minutes. Colour. / An artist wandering the countryside rests by a lake: as he hums to himself, a Spaceship arrives. Its pilot – a Shapeshifting fluorescent triangle-eyed slug-like ...
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 ...