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Sunday 19 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 ...
Ship, Reuben
(1915-1975) Canadian Radio scriptwriter and author; in US from 1939 to 1953, when he was deported after refusing to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee (as what is known in America as a premature anti-fascist, he had staged leftist plays before 1939); from 1956 until his death he lived in the UK. Though he was active in radio and Television in his later career, he remains best known for his ...
Yanagihara, Hanya
(1974- ) US journalist, editor and author best-known for the nonfantastic novel A Little Life (2015). Her first novel, The People in the Trees (2013), which is of sf interest, takes some elements from the life and career of Daniel Carleton Gajdusek (1923-2008), an eminent medical researcher who identified a cure for kuru, a deadly disease afflicting the South Fore people of New Guinea through their practice of funerary cannibalism, for which he ...
McConkey, James
(1921-2019) US academic and author of a desultory Postmodern Dystopia, Kayo: The Authentic and Annotated Autobiographical Novel from Outer Space (1987), a story within a story within a story told ultimately by a narrator whose name – Ohcnas, Sancho [Panza] spelled backwards – and whose crime – he kills the Nod – confesses McConkey's Satirical, deflating ...
Stevenson, Chris
(? - ) US author whose Planet Janitor sequence of Space Operas, beginning with Planet Janitor: Custodian of the Stars (2012), features the harum-scarum adventures of the eponymous disposal firm in the solar system, and beyond, where First Contact is achieved with exaggeratedly dangerous Aliens. The Girl They Sold to the Moon ...
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 ...