SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Sunday 26 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 ...
Weil, Josh
(1976- ) US author whose first work was a nonfantastic collection, The New Valley: Novellas (coll 2009); his first novel, The Great Glass Sea (2014), should probably be thought in terms of Fantastika broadly conceived rather than primarily as sf. Though it is technically set not in a vague very Near Future but rather in an Alternate History ...
Mice
The rodents most frequently found in sf are Rats (which see); but mice, their less threatening relatives, are also involved in similar sf tropes. A mouse civilization on a lost Pacific Island is discovered in The Wonders of Mouseland (1901) by Edward Earle Childs. The Iconic cartoon character Mickey Mouse, dating from 1928, has occasional science-fictional ...
Kirk, Tim
(1947- ) US artist. While attending California State University, Long Beach, in the 1960s, Kirk became an enthusiastic member of the science fiction community and began contributing artwork to Fanzines, including a number of first-page cartoons that are credited as cover art for numerous issues of Locus. From the start, he displayed a knack for playful renderings of familiar figures from ...
Mandel, George
(1920-2021) US Comics artist who drew some Superhero figures including The Woman in Red – first seen in Thrilling Comics #2 (March 1940) and identified as the first female masked crime-fighter – Black Marvel for Timely and Blue Bolt for Novelty, until he was badly wounded in World War Two. / Mandel then turned to writing, beginning with the early Beat novel ...
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 ...