SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Sunday 26 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 ...
Conquest, Joan
(1883-1941) Pseudonym of UK author Mary Eliza Louise Cooke (Mrs Leonard Cooke), born Mary Eliza Gripper and also known as Sister Martin-Nicholson following her first, brief marriage in 1907 to Allen Martin Reuben Nicholson (1883-1915); she married Leonard Cooke in 1915. She is known for floridly euphemistic (though superficially daring) novels of high romance, typical of which are Leonie of the Jungle (1921), whose eponymous heroine escapes the ...
Daniels, Karen
(1957- ) US author who began publishing work of genre interest with "Life-Giver" for Keen SF in 1997 as by Karen M Daniels, and whose Zaddack Tales sequence – comprising Dancing Suns (2000), Mentor's Lair (2001) and Mindspark (2002) – joins a human female, possibly the sole survivor of her race in this Far Future venue, with an ...
Corkran, Alice
(1856-1916) UK journalist and author, for many years (dates not known) the partner of Richard Whiteing. She is of mild interest for the title story assembled in Mrs Wishing-to-be and Other Stories (coll 1883), in which an implausibly described broomstick-like Spaceship takes the protagonist to the Moon; and for Down the Snow Stairs; Or, From Good-Night to Good-Morning ...
Sharp, Elliott
(1951- ). US avant-garde classical composer. A restlessly inventive artist, Sharp has released nearly a hundred albums (as solo projects or in collaboration with many other figures), a good number of which evidence interest in sf, broadly conceived; although without lyrical or deictic pointers, such an identification is arguable in some cases. Sharp is an aesthetically promiscuous musician who works with minimalism, atonal and noise-experimentation as well as elements of ...
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 ...