SF Encyclopedia Home Page
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 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 ...
Todd, Larry S
(1948-2024) US author and illustrator who began to publish work of genre interest with cartoons in Imagination from the June 1956 issue. His first prose story was "Simon Says" in If for June 1965, as Lawrence S Todd; he also published stories in Galaxy and Worlds of Tomorrow in the 1960s, and contributed artwork to all three magazines. In the 1970s he collaborated with ...
Mechanical Man, The
Italian film (1921). Original title L'Uomo Meccanico. Milano Film. Directed and written by André Deed. Cast includes André Deed, Valentina Frascaroli, Mathilde Lambert and Gabriel Moreau. 60-80 minutes. Black and white (but with colour tinting). About 26 minutes of this movie survive: it had long been considered lost, until parts of the Portuguese version were discovered in Brazil, albeit in poor condition. / When a criminal gang learn a ...
Langley, Patrick
(? - ) UK journalist, editor and author who is of sf interest for his first novel, Arkady (2018), set in a somewhat abstracted Near Future world, partly in an unnamed London, from which a poisonously Dystopian government oppresses a land increasingly transformed by Climate Change. Dreams of Arcadia shape the ...
Berna, Paul
Pseudonym of French author Jean-Marie-Edmond Sabran (1908-1994), prolific in various genres, who also wrote as Joël Audrenn, Bernard Deleuze and Paul Gerrard; of his many books for children as by Paul Berna, the most famous is the non-fantastic Le cheval sans tête (1955; trans John Buchanan-Brown as A Hundred Million Francs 1957). Of his several tales of sf interest, the Threshold of the Stars sequence – comprising ...
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 ...