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 ...
Colbeck, Alfred
(1858-1933) UK Methodist minister and author active from before 1900 as an author of magazine fiction, mostly for boys; When the Earth Swung Over: A Strange Story of the Mysterious White People of the Napo (1926; vt When the Earth Swung Over 2022) is a Lost World tale set in South America, where the survivors of the sinking of Atlantis have established a civilization. [JC]
Crack in the World
Film (1965). Security Pictures/Paramount. Directed by Andrew Marton. Written by Jon Manchip White, Julian Halevy. Cast includes Dana Andrews, Alexander Knox, Kieron Moore and Janette Scott. 96 minutes. Colour. / An attempt to use a nuclear device to tap geothermal energy from deep within the Earth causes a large and ever increasing crack in the crust. A bid to halt the process with a further nuclear explosion sends into space a large chunk of the ...
Arkham Sampler, The
US "little" magazine, review size (9 x 6 in; about 230 x 150 mm), quarterly, eight issues, Winter 1948 to Autumn 1949, published by Arkham House, edited by August Derleth. An offshoot of Arkham House's book-publishing activities, Arkham Sampler was as much a literary review as a fantasy magazine, incorporating both essays and reviews as well as fiction, a small amount of which was reprinted from obscure sources. Amongst ...
Lasaitis, Cristina
(1983- ) Brazilian medical doctor, editor and author whose first book, Fábulas do Tempo e da Eternidade ["Fables of Time and Eternity"] (coll 2008), contains strikingly cogent interplays between the SF Megatext and her professional focus on Biology and the neurosciences, most of the tales featuring examinations of the nature of ...
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 ...