SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Saturday 18 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 ...
DeMarinis, Rick
(1934-2019) US author whose first novel, A Lovely Monster: The Adventures of Claude Rains and Dr Tellenbeck (1975), applies a sharply fabulistic eye (see Fabulation) to Southern California through the lens of a revisionist take on Mary Shelley's Frankenstein; Or, the New Prometheus (1818 3vols), though in this case the ...
DeMille, Nelson
(1943-2024) US author of several Technothrillers in collaboration – originally anonymously – with Thomas H Block. The collaboration is made explicit only in the revised version of Block's first book, Mayday (1979; rev 1997 as by Thomas Block and Nelson DeMille). These tales all hover at the edge of genuine sf; of these, two are of particular interest: the ...
Roberts, Alaric J
(? - ) US author in whose New Trade Winds for the Seven Seas (1942) a Lost World is discovered beneath a Pacific Island Under the Sea inhabited by survivors of Atlantis, who agree to use their advanced Technology and civilization to help the twentieth century world above. ...
Itō Norio
(1942- ) Japanese translator, anthologist and critic, who first found fame aged nineteen with a review in Uchūjin of the magazine serialization of the sf novel Utsukushii Hoshi ["Beautiful Star"] (October 1962 Shinchō; 1967) that provoked the public ire of its author, Yukio Mishima. Itō then dropped out of his French Literature degree at Waseda University and contributed to ...
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 ...