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Friday 17 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 17 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 ...
Platt, Charles
(1945- ) UK-born author and editor, in the USA from 1970; he was born Charles Michael Platt but legally abandoned his middle name on becoming a US citizen; he has also published as by Aston Cantwell, Robert Clarke, Charlotte Prentiss and Blakely St James; married to Nancy Weber (see Lindsay West) 1977-circa 1980. Initially active in sf Fandom, writing Fanzines during this early ...
Alexander, Paul
(1937-2021) US artist who studied at the Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles, California, and after working with architectural companies and in advertising – typically producing scenes of men and Machines – began to paint Genre SF covers for New York publishers, beginning with the 1977 Ace Books paperback of ...
Astounding Award
The current name of the former John W Campbell Award for best new writer. There is a two-year eligibility period: an author first published in 2020 would be eligible for the 2021 or 2022 award but not thereafter. Though closely associated with the Hugo awards and voted for on the same ballot, the Astounding Award is not actually a Hugo. / This best new writer award was last presented under the old name during the ...
Swirsky, Rachel
(1982- ) US editor, poet and author, focusing in the latter capacity almost entirely on work in shorter forms; she began to publish work of genre interest with "Scene from a Dystopia" in Subterranean #4 (2006). By 2013 she had already released nearly fifty stories, almost all of them bristling with transgressive "violations" of the genre purities of the previous century; her work represents a strenuous and at times stringent argument for ...
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 ...