SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Saturday 25 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 ...
Battle Royale
Japanese film (2000). Toei Company presents a GAGA, Kobi Co, MF Pictures, Nippon Shuppan Hanbai (Nippan) K K and WOWOW production in association with AM Associates and Fukasaku-gumi. Directed by Kinji Fukasaku. Written by Kenta Fukasaku from the novel Battle Royale by Kōshun Takami. Cast includes Masanobu Ando, Tatsuya Fujiwara, Takeshi Kitano, Chiaki Kuriyama, Aki Maeda and Tarō Yamamoto. 114 minutes. Colour. / ...
Synge, J L
(1897-1995) Irish physicist and author whose best-known nontechnical work of nonfiction is Science, Sense and Nonsense (1951). His novel, Kandelman's Krim: A Realistic Fantasy (1957), features a long conversation in which an Orc, a Kea, a Unicorn and a Plumber discuss the concept of infinity and instruct a passing Goddess in the foundations of Mathematics. [BS]
Willis, Deborah
(? - ) Canadian author, active from around 2009, who began publishing work of genre interest with "The Hole" in Zoetrope for Witner 2013-2014. The protagonist of her first novel, Girlfriend on Mars (2023) competes on a reality Television show to win a one-way trip to Mars, inspired by boredom with her longtime partner, an increasingly unliveable planet ...
Pilkington, Ace G
(1951-2019) US academic – professor of English and history at Dixie State University, St George, Utah – and sf poet and critic who began to publish work of genre interest with the poem "One Translation of Odysseus" for Amazing Stories in July 1986; several further poems appeared in later issues of this magazine and in such venues as Asimov's and Weird Tales. Pilkington's critical works are ...
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 ...