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Monday 20 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
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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 ...
Noyes, Pierrepont B
(1870-1959) US businessman and author whose The Pallid Giant: A Tale of Yesterday and Tomorrow (1927; vt Gentlemen: You Are Mad! 1946) places in an ominous Near-Future context the discovery of records of a long-dead ancient race, which destroyed itself with Death Rays. The last survivors, one of them fortunately a scientist, undertake by Genetic Engineering to set ...
Acker, Kathy
(1947-1997) US playwright and author born Karen Alexander, who may never have met her biological father Harry Lehman Jr; she went as Kathy from early childhood, and took the surname of her first husband, Robert Acker, on ther marriage in 1966. She lived in the UK off and on for many years. Acker's apocalyptic sense of the latter-day world is conveyed in works whose tortured absurdity (see Fabulation) sometimes catches the reader by surprise, or transfixes the ...
Westerman, Percy F
(1876-1959) UK author who specialized in adventure tales for boys, though his protagonists were usually vigorous adults, as befitted their military/adventurer roles; and very frequently set at sea. He was the father of John F C Westerman. Of Westerman's 170 or more volumes between 1908 and 1959, several are Children's SF, the most successful of these being perhaps the first: The Flying Submarine (1912), an ...
Last Starfighter, The
Film (1984). Lorimar/Universal. Directed by Nick Castle. Written by Jonathan Betuel. Cast includes Lance Guest, Dan O'Herlihy, Robert Preston, Norman Snow and Catherine Mary Stewart. 101 minutes. Colour. / In this cheerful, derivative wish-fulfilment story, Alex (Guest), who lives in a trailer park, is a teenage whiz at computer arcade games. Attaining the highest-ever score on the Starfighter game, he is conscripted (though at first refusing) by its inventor, an alien ...
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 ...