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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 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 ...
Webster, Henry Kitchell
(1875-1932) US author in whose sf novel, The Sky-Man (1910), a young soldier and inventor, having built a winged lighter-than-air single-person Airship, is flying it in the Arctic where he encounters a young woman searching for her missing father, who has indicated via a message in a bottle that he has discovered a clement Lost World. He saves her from rape, and the tale ends happily. [JC]
Grattan-Smith, T E
(1871-1946) Australian ventriloquist, journalist and author of children's fiction (see Children's SF) born Thomas Edward Grattan Smith, using Grattan-Smith for his publishing activities. His Lost World novel, The Cave of a Thousand Columns (1938) exposes two young adventurers to Monsters and a non-human species known as the Birdmen in vast Underground ...
Stewart, Ian
(1945- ) UK mathematician, currently Emeritus Professor of Mathematics at the University of Warwick; he was elected to the Royal Society in 2001. His sf novels Wheelers (2000) and Heaven (2004), together with the nonfiction The Collapse of Chaos: Discovering Simplicity in a Complex World (1994) and other popular-science works of sf interest, were written in collaboration with Jack Cohen – whom ...
Steffan, Dan
(1953- ) US artist and editor active in Fanzines, Semiprozines, Convention publications and underground Comics since the early 1970s; he has contributed artwork to Algol, Ansible, FAPA, Heavy Metal, ...
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 ...