SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Saturday 25 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 ...
Bedford, K A
(1963- ) Australian author whose sf novel, Orbital Burn (2003), complexly depicts an undead female detective (she is kept alive by Nanotechnology after a hacker has infected her biosystems) who is urged by a talking dog on the colony planet Kestrel to trace his master, an Android lad behind whose fabrication by Aliens lie secrets sufficient to save (or destroy) the ...
Lamb, Harold
(1892-1962) US author, active from 1917 in Pulp magazines, often in early years writing as H A Lamb; he began publishing action stories in Adventure, beginning with "Khlit", the first of his long Cossack sequence, starring the aged but redoubtable warrior Khlit who featured in many of them; the sequence – comprised of fantastic tales technically nonfantastic solely because Lamb did not set them in an imaginary world, ...
Hornaday, William T
(1854-1937) US naturalist and taxidermist – chief taxidermist with the Smithsonian Institution from 1882, and first director of the Bronx Zoo, beginning in 1896 – and author, in whose Lost Race tale, The Man Who Became A Savage; A Story of Our Times (1896), a jaded American flees to Borneo, where he discovers an unknown civilization of headhunters. [JC]
Shadwell, Thomas
(circa 1640-1692) UK poet and playwright, Poet Laureate from 1688 until his death. Of his plays – which are now better esteemed than for the centuries after his death – The Tempest, or The Enchanted Island [for subtitle see Checklist below] (performed 1674; 1690 chap) is of some interest, though its attempts to present the fantastic in terms of spectacle now seem lame. Of greater sf interest is The Virtuoso: A Comedy Acted at the Duke's Theatre (first ...
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 ...