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Thursday 23 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 ...
Atterley, Joseph
Pseudonym of Bermuda-born scholar and author George Tucker (1775-1861), in US from 1795; Chairman of the Faculty of the University of Virginia while Edgar Allan Poe was a student there, and an influence on him. Told in the first person by its protagonist Joseph Atterley, A Voyage to the Moon: With Some Account of the Manners and Customs, Science and Philosophy, of the People of Morosofia, and Other Lunarians (1827) describes a ...
Oshikawa Shunrō
Pseudonym of Japanese author Masa'ari Oshikawa (1876-1914), whose Young Adult tales of aristocratic heroes, oceanic Robinsonades and plucky inventors were a crucial element of the Japanese zeitgeist in the Edwardian era. / Oshikawa's stories were leavened with speculative machinery, soaring martial fervour, and a sense of Japan's manifest destiny (see Imperialism). His ...
Knye, Cassandra
Joint pseudonym of Thomas M Disch and John T Sladek for a gothic novel, The House that Fear Built (1966); of Sladek alone for another, The Castle and the Key (1967); and – with the variant spelling Cassandra Nye – of Charles Naylor for a third, Steps to the Grotto (1974). The name is also given to an invented psychic described as "the ...
Sherlock Holmes
Arthur Conan Doyle's famous hero Sherlock Holmes (see Icons) was introduced as a scientific detective operating by rigorous logic – but Doyle's master-stroke was to show him through the eyes of his staunch but uncomprehending companion Doctor Watson, providing a human frame for what might have been an arid inspiration. Although Holmes stories did not always fully honour this template description, Holmes himself soon ...
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 ...