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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 ...
White, Ared
(1880-1941) US military officer and author, one of the organizers of the American Legion in 1919; Camp White in Oregon was named for him. Of his numerous stories and four novels, two books are sf. Attack on America (1939) describes a weakened, unprepared USA of the very Near Future attacked through Mexico by an international coalition dominated by Germany; as with its model, George Chesney's ...
Gray, John
(1866-1934) UK poet and translator of French Symbolist verse, best known as a member of London's decadent-aesthetic movement of the 1890s, when he was associated with Aubrey Beardsley (1872-1898), Ernest Dowson (1867-1900) and Oscar Wilde and is a possible candidate for the title character of Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (July 1890 Lippincott's Monthly; exp 1891). In Gray's one gently humorous ...
Weekend
Film (1968). Comacico/Copernic/Lira/Ascot Cineraid. Written and directed by Jean-Luc Godard. Cast includes Mireille Darc, Jean-Pierre Kalfon, Valerie Lagrange, Jean-Pierre Léaud and Jean Yanne. 103 minutes. Colour. / A Fabulation rather than sf proper, Godard's Satirical and violent film contains sf elements in its allegory of the Decline of the West. The progression of the film is from social order through ...
Champions
Role Playing Game (1981). Hero Games (HG). Designed by George MacDonald, Steve Peterson. / The first edition of Champions popularized the use of a point-based method for character creation, an idea previously seen in Superhero 2044 (1977) and The Fantasy Trip (1977-1980 Metagaming Concepts) designed by Steve Jackson. All characters begin the game ...
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 ...