SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Wednesday 22 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 20 January 2025
Sponsor of the day: Conversation 2023
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 ...
Gammon, David
(1904-1996) UK author of two closely similar Lost Race novels, The Secret of the Sacred Lake (1947), set in a snake-infested jungle wilderness, and Against the Golden Gods (1947), set in the Australian outback. Both are designed for the Young Adult market; other titles by Gammon lack sf explanations. [JC]
Benoit, M D
(1957- ) Canadian author whose Jack Meter sequence beginning with Metered Space: A Jack Meter Case File (2004) features a slightly cackhandedly hardboiled noir detective in a Near Future world where a propensity to attract Aliens with problems persuades him to make use of a Teleportation device (perhaps more simply a ...
Glendon, George
(? -? ) UK author known only for his sf Near Future novel, The Emperor of the Air (1910), in which the Invention of a superscientific Airship, lifted by a vacuum-creating engine, leads to the destruction of the air fleets of the world, and the brief imposition of a Pax Aeronautica whose rulers speak Esperanto, an ...
Barth, John
(1930-2024) US academic and author, one of the central fabulists (see Fabulation) of his generation of writers, noted for a sometimes relentless experimentalism, an inability or disinclination to seize upon the moment of story he famously articulated in "The Literature of Exhaustion" (August 1967 The Atlantic), where postmodern (see Postmodernism and SF) writers are presented as miming the genuine stories before ...
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 ...