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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 24 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 ...
Volt
Pseudonym of Italian Futurist poet and theoretician Vincenzo Fani Ciotti (1888-1927), whose sf novel, La fine del mondo ["The End of the World"] (1921), is a declaredly Fascist tale whose hero – frustrated at Earth's refusal to clear Jupiter of its natives so that humanity can press outwards to create a Galactic Empire – travels to that planet, where he immolates himself in a great explosion that destroys ...
Gowing, Sidney
(1877-1943) UK author who also wrote as by David Goodwin, as by John Goodwin (who should be distinguished from the real John C Goodwin), and as by John Tregillis. Much of his work for the Boys' Papers appeared as single-issue tales (here treated as individual titles) in the Boys' Friend Library, either reprinted from earlier sources or original, beginning with the nonfantastic Man to Man (1908) as by David ...
Interactive Narrative
The outcome of any given game is inherently uncertain, since it must be possible to win or lose (or, in the case of Toy Games, to play at will). Yet stories, as normally understood, should have a beginning, a middle and an end, and only one of each. Games which include stories – referred to in this encyclopedia as Interactive Narratives – have thus proved difficult to design. There has also been considerable debate as to whether it is desirable, or even ...
Pain, Barry
(1864-1928) UK author active from the 1880s, best known for the supernatural tales assembled in volumes like Stories in the Dark (coll 1901) and Stories in Grey (coll 1911), and for humorous fiction in which he uneasily condescended to the lower orders, the best known of these being the nonfantastic Eliza tales. He frequently made slanting use of sf devices and motifs, as in The Octave of Claudius (1897), whose protagonist submits, for a large ...
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 ...