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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 ...
Butler, William Francis
(1838-1910) Irish soldier and author whose military involvement in the Riel Rebellion in western Canada resulted in his recommending the creation of what would eventually become the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. He was in active service, with the rank of colonel, when he published anonymously a Battle of Dorking tale, The Invasion of England: Told Twenty Years After (1882) as By an Old Soldier, in which Germany mounts an ...
Edelman, Maurice
(1911-1975) Welsh politician, Labour member of Parliament from 1945 to 1975, and author in various genres, whose A Call on Kuprin (1959) sets a strongly conceived drama of Near Future science and politics in Russia; as a play, it had a successful Broadway run in 1961. [JC]
Palmer, John
(1885-1944) UK author, known mostly for numerous detective novels and thrillers in collaboration with Hilary Saunders (1898-1951), both writing together as Francis Beeding (for their joint sf see that entry); "bad eyesight" barred him from active service in World War One. The Hesperides: A Looking-Glass Fugue (1936) by Palmer solo is a Satire in the style of the ...
Tani Kōshū
(1951- ) Seiun Award-winning Japanese author in multiple genres, a graduate in civil engineering from the Osaka Institute of Technology, whose work, in retrospect, largely divides into a sprawling Military SF Future History and a set of Near-Future Technothrillers; not included ...
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 ...