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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 ...
Time Stranger
Japanese Original Video Animation film (1986; original title Tenshi no Tamago). Madhouse. Directed by Mori Masaki. Written by Mori Masaki, Yoshio Takeuchi and Atsushi Yamatoya, based on the novel Toraerareta Schoolbus/Jikū no Tabibito (1986) by Taku Mayumura. Voice cast includes Takeshi Aono Makio Inoue, Mitsuo Iwata, Seiji Kumagai, Hiromi Murata, Osamu Saka, Keiko Toda, ...
Robinson, Phil
(1847-1902) UK journalist and author of stories and essays mostly set in a romanticized India or Africa (see Imperialism); his collections, usually interspersing fiction and nonfiction, include some sf. Of strongest interest may be "The Hunting of the Soko" (in Under the Punkah, coll 1881), an Apes as Human tale that may have influenced Edgar Rice Burroughs's creation of ...
Eco, Umberto
(1932-2016) Italian academic and author active from the mid-1950s, famed for his work in history, philosophy, literary criticism and semiotics. His adult novels are not explicitly sf, the closest he came to the genre being in two children's books, La bomba e il generale (1966 chap; trans William Weaver as The Bomb and the General 1989 chap) and I tre cosmonauti (1966 chap; trans William Weaver as The Three Astronauts 1989 chap), in the ...
Whiteson, Leon
(1930-2013) Southern-Rhodesia-born architect, journalist and author, resident variously in UK, USA and Canada. He is of sf interest for Scanners (1980; vt David Cronenberg's Scanners 1981), a Tie novelizing the screenplay of the film Scanners (1980) directed by David Cronenberg. [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 ...