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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 24 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 ...
Gamow, George
(1904-1968) Russian physicist born Georgiy Antonovich Gamov, involved in the development of quantum theory at Göttingen and later a colleague of Niels Bohr (1885-1962) and Ernest Rutherford (1871-1937). He defected in 1934 to the US, working from that year at George Washington University, where he eventually held the chair of theoretical physics; he became a US citizen in 1940, but was barred from the Manhattan Project, presumably as a security risk. After important work on stellar ...
Dennis, Andrew
(1971- ) US author who began to publish work of genre interest with "Between the Armies" in Ring of Fire (anth 2004) edited by Eric Flint, a theme anthology of stories set in the Shared World of Flint's Assiti Shards: 1632 Alternate History sequence. Dennis later collaborated on two full-length novels in this series: 1635: The Cannon Law ...
Mantegazza, Paolo
(1831-1910) Italian neurologist, physiologist, anthropologist and author whose early advocacy of the theory of Evolution was channelled through a hierarchical understanding of the course of human development and history (see Social Darwinism), a global understanding of the world that shapes the proto-Futurism (see Filippo Tommaso Marinetti) of his enthusiastic ...
Last and First Men
Film (2017). Icelandic Film Centre, Zik Zak Filmworks. Directed by Jóhann Jóhannsson. Written by Jóhannsson. From Last and First Men (1930) by Olaf Stapledon. Music by Jóhannsson. Cast consists of Tilda Swinton (voice only). 70 minutes. Black and white. / All that can be seen for the seventy minute duration of Last and First Men, via slow tracking shots in black and white, is nothing more than ...
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 ...