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 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 ...
Takt Op. Destiny
Japanese animated tv series (2021; vt Tákt: Op.). MAPPA, Madhouse. Directed by Yūki Itō. Written by Kiyoko Yoshimura. Voice cast includes Eiji Hanawa, Satoshi Hino, Kaede Hondo, Miku Itō, Kōki Uchiyama and Shion Wakayama. Twelve 24-minute episodes. Colour. / Shooting stars rain onto the Earth and their "beautiful stones" are studied by Scientists. Some years later, ...
Johnson, Stanley
(1940- ) UK politician, businessman, environmentalist and author. His novels, beginning with Gold Drain (1967), tend to be political/spy thrillers, some of which are sufficiently explorative to be thought of as Technothrillers. The Marburg Virus (1982; vt The Virus 2020) follows the efforts of an epidemiologist to trace an incipient Pandemic back to its source, with a ...
Dann, Joshua
(1956- ) US author who has written since 2000 under the name J D Austin; under his own name, he published the Timeshare sequence of sf adventures in which a police detective, now in the employ of a firm which offers Time Travel vacations, journeys to various eras and solves problems: after the introductory shenanigans of Timeshare (1997), he travels to 1920s Hollywood (see California) in ...
Tesla, Nikola
(1856-1943) Croatian-born (though of Serbian origin) inventor, engineer and futurist, in the US from 1884, where he was immediately hired by Thomas Alva Edison for the Edison Machine Works. The association with Edison would benefit and plague both men for the rest of their lives: Edison the pragmatic (and sometimes unscrupulous) inventor as entrepreneur; Tesla the visionary (and sometimes nearly demented) inventor as ...
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 ...