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.
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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 ...
Kissick, Lucy
(? - ) UK planetary geochemist in the nuclear industry and author whose first novel, Plutoshine (2022), describes with numerate intensity the attempted Terraforming of Pluto (see Outer Planets) by a team of scientists and others troubled by evidences of sabotage. There is a remoteness to the telling that evokes the latter-day ...
Book of Eli, The
Film (2010). Alcon Entertainment presents a Silver Pictures production. Directed by Albert and Allen Hughes. Written by Gary Whitta. Cast includes Jennifer Beals, Mila Kunis, Gary Oldman, Ray Stevenson and Denzel Washington. 117 minutes. Colour. / Stylishly shot, hammily played Post-Holocaust western centred on an enigmatic loner (Washington) carrying the last King James Bible on a coast-to-coast mission obstructed by a local warlord (Oldman), who ...
Sternbach, Rick
Working name of American artist Richard Michael Sternbach (1951- ), born in Connecticut. He left the University of Connecticut after three years to begin working as an artist and garnered his first sf assignment in 1973, for the October 1973 issue of Analog, illustrating G Harry Stine's article "A Program for Space Flight" with interior art and a cover depicting two spherical spacecraft near an enormous planet. ...
Stella
Alleged early sf magazine in Sweden, described as follows by Sam J Lundwall in the Scandinavia entry in the second edition of this encyclopedia: "There was an early attempt at a Swedish sf magazine, Stella – four irregular issues April 1886-August 1888, with short stories by [...] foreign authors and a scattering of anonymous material that may have been by local hands – but it was much before its time and ...
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 ...