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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 ...
Bergsøe, Vilhelm
(1835-1911) Danish author whose Proto SF novella "Erindringen fra en Reise med Flyvefisken 'Prometheus'" ["Recollections of a Journey with the Flying Fish 'Prometheus'"] (1870 Illustreret Tidende; trans Dwight R Decker as Flying Fish "Prometheus" 2015), which is set a century after its publication, during a time of recovery after the great Anglo-American war. The protagonist flies the eponymous ...
Jennings, Gordon
(1896-1953) Special effects pioneer who worked on nearly 200 films in his long career. These included Dr Cyclops (1940), and the supernatural comedy-romance I Married a Witch (1942). He is of most importance to the sf film for overseeing the effects for The War of the Worlds (1953). Unfortunately Jennings died before this film's release and subsequent great success. [GSt]
Moscoe, Mike
(1947- ) US author who began publishing work of genre interest with "Summer Hopes – Winter Dreams" in Analog for March 1991, but who has since concentrated mainly on series, sometimes as by Mike Shepherd, beginning with the Lost Millennium sequence comprising First Dawn (1996) Second Fire (1997) and Lost Days (1998), whose protagonists arrive via Time Travel ...
Lucas, George
(1944- ) US film-maker. He attended the University of Southern California Film School and as a graduate student made an sf short there entitled THX 1138:4EB (1967), which won film festival awards. Working in 1968 as an assistant to Francis Ford Coppola he made a highly praised documentary about the filming of Coppola's The Rain People (1969); then in 1969, with Coppola as executive producer, Lucas began a feature-film version, ...
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 ...