SF Encyclopedia Home Page
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 ...
Sellman, Tamara Kaye
(? - ) US filmmaker, editor, journalist and author who began to publish work of genre interest with "Shrapnel Over Chicago: August, 1989" in MOTA 3: Courage (anth 2003) edited by Karen Joy Fowler. The mixture of fiction and nonfiction forms in Intention Tremor: A Hybrid Collection (coll 2021 chap) is designed to dramatize her response to a 2013 diagnosis of multiple sclerosis. The tales ...
Kenyon, Ley
(1913-1990) UK designer, photographer and illustrator, active from the 1930s; after gaining the Distinguished Flying Cross as a rear-gunner while serving in World War Two, he was shot down on his 45th mission, and as a prisoner of war forged passports and other papers in preparation for the Great Escape from Stalag Luft III in 1944; in later life, he specialized in images of the underwater world, publishing several nonfiction books on the subject, the best ...
Mulisch, Harry
(1927-2010) Dutch author, mainly influential at home (see Benelux) and abroad for his intensely ambitious scrutinies of World War Two, mostly couched as novels without any overt fantastic element, though Hoogste Tijd (1985; trans Adrienna Dixon as Last Call 1989) in the end plunges its crypto-Nazi protagonist into the cosmic abyss that climaxes Edgar Allan Poe's ...
Véry, Pierre
(1900-1960) French screenwriter, journalist and author active from the mid-1920s, under several names including Toussaint Judge; best known for his many crime novels. His sf novel, Le pays sans étoiles ["Land Without Stars"] (1945; trans Stuart Gilbert as In What Strange Land 1949), is a thriller built around the possibility that a woman intruder – mysteriously connected with a Perception-distorting wasteland at the heart ...
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 ...