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Friday 24 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 24 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 ...
Daventry, Leonard
(1915-1987) UK author whose first sf novel, A Man of Double Deed (1965), began the Claus Coman series of tales set on an Earth partly recovered from nuclear Disaster and run by Telepaths, one of whom, the protagonist, is assigned the task of solving various problems. The sequels, two book-length stories, were published together as Reflections in a Mirage, and The Ticking Is in Your Head (coll 1969) ...
Downing, David
(1946- ) UK historian and author of the Hitler Wins Alternate History text, The Moscow Option: An Alternative Second World War (1979; rev 2001), which depends upon two Jonbar Points: Hitler is immobilized after a plane crash, which allows his generals to drive straight to Moscow; and the Americans are defeated at Midway. The text stops at 1942, with ...
Ketterer, David
(1942- ) UK academic and author (with a DPhil from the University of Sussex); based for many years at Concordia University, Montreal; now in the UK. His New Worlds for Old: The Apocalyptic Imagination, Science Fiction, and American Literature (1974) interestingly, though utilizing a rather academic terminology, links apocalyptic themes in US Mainstream literature with similar obsessions in ...
Greider, George Michael
(1944- ) US author of Forever Man (1995), whose Technothriller elements are soon swamped in speculative forays into territories metaphysical and secular, and by a plot which focuses on a Pariah Elite of Immortals, and upon the deaths they cause. [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 ...