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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 ...
Applin, Arthur
(1873-1949) UK aviator in World War One, playwright and author whose Near Future sf tale, The Priest of Piccadilly (1910) offers the worry that Britain might be taken over through a revolution fomented by a demagogue. [JC]
Lichtenberger, André
(1870-1940) French editor, politician and author. Of his several works of fantasy or sf, Les Centaures, roman fantastique (Paris: Calman-Lévy, 1904) and Pickles, ou récits à la mode anglaise ["Pickles; Or, Stories in the English Style"] (coll 1923), have been assembled as The Centaurs and Other Stories (omni trans Brian Stableford 2013). The title novel is a prehistoric fantasy about the ...
Thurston, Robert
(1936-2021) US author and academic who attended the first Clarion Science Fiction Writers' Workshop in 1968 and began to publish work of genre interest with "Stop Me before I Tell More", in Orbit 9 (anth 1971) edited by Damon Knight, and who was for some years known only for his short work. This is notable more for its examination of individual humans caught in social or sexual extremis ...
Gammon, Hana
(2002- ) South African author who began to publish work of genre interest with "The Undertaker's Apprentice" in Granta for 12 May 2023; her first novel, The Specimens (2024), set initially in a Keep-like carceral research facility apparently in the Near Future, intensely explores the responses of a Telepathic inmate to constant experimentation, and to a growing ...
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 ...