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Saturday 18 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 ...
Jones, Mark
(?1947-2003) UK author of nonfiction about Russia and Communism [not listed below] and of a Technothriller, Black Lightning (1995), in which post-Communist Russia develops a gigantic electromagnetic-pulse Weapon called Molniya ["Lightning"] which is capable of shutting down Power Sources and Communications anywhere in Europe or America. Its ultimate ...
Silent Village, The
Film (1943). Crown Film Unit, Czechoslovak Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Ministry of Information. Directed and written by Humphrey Jennings. Cast drawn from the inhabitants of Cwmgiedd, South Wales. 36 minutes. Black and white. / The Silent Village is presented as a documentary, opening with a title card describing the World War Two atrocity committed by German forces in the mining town of Lidice, ...
Morgan, Dave
Working name of David O W Morgan (1951- ), UK author of three novels for Robert Hale Limited, Reiver (1975), in which Mercenary Guilds provide an outlet for youthful aggression and thus maintain world peace; Genetic Two (1976), with a struggle for survival on a far planet; and Adverse Camber (1977). Each is an unremarkable but efficient sf adventure. [JC]
Transportation
Sf stories based on serious speculations about future means of transportation are greatly outnumbered by stories in which those means function as facilitating devices – i.e., as convenient ways of shifting characters into an alien environment. Inevitably, the same kinds of machines crop up in both categories of story because stories of the second kind borrow heavily from those of the first. Spaceships have been employed by sf writers almost exclusively as a ...
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 ...