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.
Site updated on 17 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 ...
Golden Heroes
Role Playing Game (1984). Games Workshop (GW). Designed by Simon Burley, Peter Haines. / Golden Heroes, like Villains and Vigilantes (1979) and Champions (1981), is an early Role Playing Game with a Superhero theme. Its mechanics are generally well designed and closely match the ...
Crime and Punishment
Genre fiction concerned with crime may be roughly divided into detections and thrillers. The former are problem stories; the latter exploit the melodramatic potential of the conflicts inherent in criminal deviation. For further discussion of the many forms of punishment found in sf, see the entries for Prisons and Torture. / Detective stories depend very heavily on ingenuity and generally require very fine distinctions between what ...
Stump, D L
(? -? ) US author whose sf novel, From World to World (1896; exp vt The Love of Meltha Laone; Or, Beyond the Sun 1913), describes a transit by Spaceship from Earth to Counter-Earth; various lessons are taken from this opposition of planets, focusing in particular on the advanced Utopia discovered on the latter. [JC]
McAllister, Peter
(1965- ) Australian anthropologist and author, usually of books for younger children; of sf interest is Cosmonaut (2001), a Near Future murder mystery set on a space station where Americans and Russians cohabit uneasily. [JC]
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 ...