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.
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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 ...
Mad Monster, The
Film (1942). Producers Releasing Corporation. Produced by Sigmund Neufeld. Directed by Sam Newfield. Written by Fred Myton. Cast includes Gordon De Main, Johnny Downs, Anne Nagel, Glenn Strange, Robert Strange and George Zucco. 77 minutes. Black and white. / Somewhere in southeastern US swamplands Dr Lorenzo Cameron (Zucco) conducts experiments to turn humans into animal-men, here a type of Werewolf. His mentally handicapped groundskeeper Petro ...
Carr, Wallace
Pseudonym of UK author Reginald Aubrey Gibbin (1890-1973), mostly of romances for teenage girls, active from around 1930; he is of some sf interest for The Grotto of Arratsu (1940), whose two young protagonists discover a Lost Race on an unknown Island in the Atlantic Ocean, where great gates in the eponymous Underground grotto once opened the way to Atlantis ...
X Minus One
Radio series (1955-1958). NBC-Radio network. NBC staff writers included Ernest Kinroy, George Lefferts and Howard Rodman. 126 30-minute episodes. / Initially a revival of Dimension X (1950-1951), this sf Radio drama anthology series was partnered at first with Astounding and later (from February 1956) with Galaxy, from which magazines the vast majority of stories were ...
Ditmar Award
The Australian SF Awards, familiarly known as the Ditmars, were first given in 1969 and are presented in various categories for sf, fantasy and horror-related work by Australians. The name comes from the long-time Australian fan and artist "Dick" Jenssen, whose full name is Martin James Ditmar Jenssen and who won the award in fan artist categories in 2002 and 2010. Voting resembles the system used for the Hugos but is associated with membership of the annual Australian ...
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 ...