SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 21 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 20 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 ...
Cantor, Jay
(1948- ) US academic and author whose first novel, Krazy Kat: A Novel in Five Panels (1988), Equipoisally implants two characters from the Comic strip Krazy Kat (1916-1944) by George Herriman (1880-1944) – the eponymous Cat and Ignatz Mouse – into a "real-world" analogue of the surrealized Coconino County, Arizona, where the comic is set. Caught in this ...
Gattaca
Film (1997). Columbia Pictures presents a Jersey Films production. Written and directed by Andrew Niccol. Cast includes Loren Dean, Ethan Hawke, Jude Law, Uma Thurman and Gore Vidal. 106 minutes. Colour. / In a future where Genetic Engineering allows children to be optimized at conception and Eugenic DNA screening is routine in elite employment, a ...
Hardy, Thomas
(1840-1928) UK poet and author, a writer whose greatness was manifest throughout his prolific career; initially most famous for his nineteenth-century novels, beginning with Desperate Remedies (1871 3vols) and concluding with Jude the Obscure (1896), most of them set in the imaginary county of Wessex (roughly corresponding to Dorset). None of them contain explicit narrative elements of the fantastic, though as Brian W Aldiss argued ...
Gray, Claudia
Pseudonym of US lawyer and author Amy Vincent (1970- ), much of whose work has been paranormal romances for Young Adult readers, like the Evernight sequence beginning with Evernight (2008), a set of tales involving Vampires at a boarding school, but who has also written sf for the same market. The young protagonist of the Firebird sequence beginning with ...
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 ...