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 20 January 2025
Sponsor of the day: Joe Haldeman
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 ...
Lawson, Alfred William
(1869-1954) US baseball player (a pitcher very briefly in the National Baseball League in 1890), opponent of the Ku Klux Klan (he attempted to break the colour bar in professional baseball), aviator and businessman (founder of Lawson Aircraft Company in 1919), inventor (mainly of the Pseudoscience Lawsonomy, a unified field principle that explains physics in terms of "zig-zag and swirl" and other principles: "Suction is the female of movement and Pressure is ...
Cunningham, Beall
Working name of Dorothy Beall Cunningham (? - ), author of Wide White Page (1936), a tale featuring a modern Utopia founded in the Antarctic. Cunningham also published at least one nonfantastic novel under her full name. [DRL]
Welles, Paul O'M
(? - ) US author of Project Lambda (1979), a Near Future Dystopian Satire set in an America where homosexual men are first murdered and then – after the government sees an opportunity to publicly humiliate any survivors – sent to concentration camps where they will be castrated; but public outrage saves the day. [JC]
Galileo
US letter-size magazine. 16 issues September 1976-January 1980, with #11/12, May 1979, being a double issue. Planned as quarterly, but bimonthly to September 1978, then irregular, with the last 4 issues bimonthly. Published by Vincent McCaffrey of Avenue Victor Hugo, Boston, Massachusetts; edited by Charles C Ryan. / Published on a small budget, Galileo hoped to survive through subscription sales rather than newsstand distribution. 8000 copies of ...
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 ...