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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 20 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 ...
Wheeler, J Craig
(1943- ) US astronomer, academic and author whose The Krone Experiment (1986) begins as a very Near Future Technothriller but soon expands its narrative grasp as the threat to Earth turns out to be a Black Hole that threatens to devour the planet. The nonfiction Cosmic Catastrophes: Exploding Stars, Black Holes, and Mapping the Universe (2007) is ...
Toxic Avenger, The
Film (1984). HCH/Troma/Palan. Directed by Michael Herz, Samuel Weil. Written by Joe Ritter, based on a story by Lloyd Kaufman. Cast includes Mitchell Cohen, Andree Maranda and Mark Torgl. 100 minutes, cut to 79 minutes. Colour. / After a cruel practical joke is played on him, a teenage nerd falls into a barrel of toxic waste in Tromaville, New Jersey, "Toxic Waste Capital of America". He mutates (see Mutants) into the low-budget ...
Searls, Hank
Working name of US author and screenwriter Henry Hunt Searls Jr (1922-2017), who began publishing work of genre interest with "Drop Dead Twice" for Black Mask Magazine in March 1950, though his first sf proper was "Martyr's Flight" for Imagination in December 1955. His sf has been primarily restricted to Near-Future tales set in the glory days of the early space age, like his first novel, The Big X (1959), in ...
Walsh, Goodwin
(? -? ) US author known only for one novel, The Voice of the Murderer (1926), of sf interest for depicting the Invention and consequences of a kind of Time Machine which accesses sounds from the past; as the title indicates, the voice of a murderer is thus detected. Walsh may be a not yet identified pseudonym. [JC]
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 ...