SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Saturday 25 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
Sponsor of the day: Stuart Hopen
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 ...
Yücel, Tahsin
(1933-2016) Turkish academic, translator and author; of sf interest is a Near Future novel, Gökdelen (2006; trans Ender Gürol as Skyscraper 2013), whose exceedingly wealthy architect protagonist instigates in 2073 a plan to modernize Istanbul on rigorously Modernist lines: the Utopia being created features a central grid of identical skyscrapers, an emblematic ...
Shirley, Robert
(? - ) US author whose Near Future Satire on American Politics Teenocracy (1969) may miss the mark in assuming that the land will be ruled in 1990 by the eponymous cohort, which has disenfranchised senior citizens. The world of Teenocracy is due to be further transformed by Genetic Engineering, ...
Smullyan, Raymond
(1919-2017) US mathematician, philosopher and author, professor of philosophy at the City University of New York and Indiana University. His popular non-academic works include many collections of ingenious logical puzzles, often – as in similar writings by Martin Gardner, Douglas Hofstadter and Ian Stewart – spiced with Fantastika. Thus the ...
Horrors of Spider Island
Film (1959, released 1960; vt The Body in the Web; vt It's Hot in Paradise). Produced by Gaston Hakim and Wolf C Hartwig. Directed by Fritz Böttger (credited as Jamie Nolan). Written by Böttger, Eldon Howard and Albert G Miller. Cast includes Alex D'Arcy, Helga Franck, Dorothee Parker (credited as Norma Townes) and Barbara Valentin. 89 minutes, sometimes cut to 82 minutes. Black and white. / Nightclub owner Gary (D'Arcy) interviewing assorted women 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 ...