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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.
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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 ...
Oldfield, Mike
(1953- ) English composer and performer, whose multi-layered, multi-instrumental and usually vocal-free work has enjoyed considerable commercial success. His first and perhaps most influential release, Tubular Bells (1973) was a fluently inventive, varied and musically charming piece, not least in its cod-caveman interlude "Piltdown Man". Of his many dozen subsequent releases, Oldfield's most straightforwardly science-fictional album is ...
Moonbase 3
UK tv serial (1973). BBC TV. Produced by Barry Letts. Script edited by Terrance Dicks. Scriptwriters Dicks and Letts (first episode), and John Brason, John Lucarotti, Arden Winch. Directors Ken Hannam, Christopher Barry. Scientific advisor James Burke, a well known presenter of television popular-science programmes. Cast includes Ralph Bates, Fiona Gaunt, Donald Houston and Barry Lowe. ...
Nines, The
Film (2007). Destination Films/Jinks-Cohen Company. Written and directed by John August. Cast includes Hope Davis, Elle Fanning, Melissa McCarthy, Ryan Reynolds and Octavia Spencer. 100 minutes. Colour. / Perturbations in reality intrude on an actor, a television showrunner, and a Videogame auteur (all Reynolds), whose worlds interlock without overlapping; all three Identities are revealed as ...
Sims, Alan
(? - ) Author, presumably UK, of the novels Phoinix (1928) and Anna Perenna (1930). Phoinix reworks Greek Mythology, not only retelling the saga of Achilles in the Trojan War but bringing in Hercules, the Argonauts and the poet Homeros (see Homer), who here exaggerates Achilles' rage and violence for dramatic effect. Anna Perenna (1930) is a broad ...
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 ...