SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 21 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 ...
Jones, Jeffrey
(1944-2011) American artist born Jeffrey Durwood Jones, who for many years used the working name Jeff Jones, and after hormone therapy (from 1998) and gender transition was named and worked as Jeffrey Catherine Jones. After some initial work for Comic books in the mid-1960s, Jones began producing an amazing number of covers for various publishers, often illustrating works of Sword and Sorcery. This work immediately stood out for ...
Buettner, Robert
(1947- ) US palaeontologist, lawyer, Vietnam veteran and author, whose Military SF Orphanage sequence – beginning with Orphanage (2004) and ending with Orphan's Triumph (2009) – has frequently been likened to Robert A Heinlein's Starship Troopers (October-November 1959 F&SF as "Starship Soldier"; 1959), though the ...
Rojas, Agustín de
Working name of Agustín de Rojas Anido (1949-2011), considered one of the most relevant sf Cuban authors. A biologist by training, having pursued a career in sport medicine, he dedicated his life to teaching (mostly theatre) and writing. He has an extensive and eclectic oeuvre. / His literary debut was the novel Espiral ["Spiral"] (1982), which in 1980 was awarded the prestigious Cuban Premio David ["David Award"] for new, unpublished ...
Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace
Film (1999). A Lucasfilm Ltd Production. Directed by George Lucas. Written by Lucas. Cast includes Jake Lloyd, Ian McDiarmid, Ewan McGregor, Liam Neeson and Natalie Portman. 133 minutes. Colour. / Although the work of a man in his fifties, The Phantom Menace is the most juvenile of the Star Wars films. The opening film in a prequel trilogy, the movie suffers from being a first act. Characters 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 ...