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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.
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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 ...
Dold, Elliott
(1889-1957) US illustrator, son of noted psychiatrist William Elliott Dold (1856-1942) and younger brother of Douglas Dold. His birth year is often given as 1892, but 1889 has been confirmed. Dold studied art at the College of William and Mary in Virginia to 1912, and with his brother joined the Serbian army in 1915. Although his 44 Art Deco drawings for Harold Hersey's Night (1923) are perhaps his finest work, ...
Egan, Jennifer
(1962- ) US author whose early short fiction – most of it smilingly disjunctive (see Postmodernism and SF) and some of it of direct fantastic interest – was assembled in Emerald City: The Collected Works of Jennifer Egan (coll 1993; exp vt Emerald City 1996). The protagonist of her second novel, Look at Me (2001), a model with an artificial face, transacts a hallucinated ...
Frakes, Jonathan
(1952- ) US actor, best known for his role as Commander William T Riker in all 187 episodes of the second Star Trek television series, Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987-1994); he also directed several episodes of this and other Star Trek series as well as the films Star Trek: First Contact (1996) and Star Trek: Insurrection (1998). His sf ...
Wiesner, David
(1956- ) US illustrator and graphic artist, almost all of his work being designed for young audiences; he has received much esteem and several awards for this work, most of which falls outside the remit of this encyclopedia and is not listed below. He is of strong if indirect sf interest for Sector 7 (graph 1999), a wordless tale whose young protagonist is taken by an animate cloud from the top of the Empire State Building (see ...
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 ...