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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 ...
Great Wall, The
Chinese film (2016; vt Chang Cheng). Legendary East, Le Vision, Atlas Entertainment, China Film Group, Universal Pictures. Directed by Zhang Yimou, starring Matt Damon, Pedro Pascal, Willem Dafoe, Jing Tian, Andy Lau. Written by Carlo Bernard, Doug Miro, Tony Gilroy. 104 minutes. Colour. / In the eleventh century CE, William (Damon) and Tovar (Pascal) are the last survivors of a group of European mercenaries who have made the long journey to China ...
Brewer, Gene
(1937- ) US author of the K-PAX sequence featuring a protagonist calling himself "prot" (lower case) who claims to his psychiatrist "Gene Brewer" in the ward where he has been detained that he is a visiting Alien from the planet K-PAX. Throughout the sequence – which comprises K-PAX (1995), On a Beam of Light (2001; vt K-PAX II: On a Beam of Light 2001) and ...
Maxwell, Edward
Pseudonym of the Canadian author, playwright and scriptwriter Ted Allan (1916-1995), who was born Allan Herman and adopted this working name in the 1930s; he was in the UK approximately 1940-1970. The protagonist of his Time Travel tale, Quest for Pajaro (1957), travels twenty years into the future but, on his journey back, falls in love; doom threatens successfully. [JC]
Boys from Brazil, The
Film (1978). Producer Circle. Directed Franklin J Schaffner. Written by Heywood Gould, based on The Boys from Brazil (1976) by Ira Levin. Cast includes Jeremy Black, James Mason, Laurence Olivier and Gregory Peck. 125 minutes. Colour. / Like the novel on which it is based, this is an absurd but entertaining concoction of pulp-thriller conventions with some rather interesting scientific conjecture about environment and heredity. Joseph ...
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 ...