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 ...
Tarde, Gabriel
Writing name of French sociologist Jean Gabriel de Tarde (1843-1904), whose investigations into the psychology of crowds, focusing on minute (and, as it were, epidemic) interactions among individuals defined through their membership in a group, only became influential after about 1950. His prescient sense of the nature of a twentieth-century world consumed by "progress" is eloquently manifest in La Psychologie économique ["Economic Psychology"] (1902 2vols), as first ...
Disappearance of Flight 412, The
Made-for-tv film (1974). Cine Films Inc/Cinemobile Productions for NBC-TV. Produced by Gerald L Adler. Directed by Jud Taylor. Written by George E Simpson and Neal R Burger. Cast includes Bradford Dillman, Glenn Ford, Robert F Lyons, Greg Mullavey, Kent Smith, David Soul and Guy Stockwell. Narrator: Herbert Ellis (uncredited). 72 minutes. Black and white/colour. / US Air Force patrol 412, led by Captain Roy Bishop (Soul) and his crew including ...
Roberts, Tony
Working name of British artist Anthony Roberts (1950- ), occasionally bylined thus but more often credited as Tony Roberts. After receiving artistic training at Wolverhampton College of Art from 1967 to 1969, and at Ravensbourne College of Art from 1969 to 1972, he almost immediately began painting sf book covers. While his first two covers – for a 1973 edition of Ralph Blum's The Simultaneous Man (1970) and a 1973 ...
Pflug, Ursula
(1958- ) Tunisian born author, raised in Canada, who began to publish work of interest with "Memory Lapse at The Waterfront" (in New Bodies: A Collection of Science Fiction, anth 1981, ed anon), which was assembled, with other speculative fictions, as After the Fires (coll 2008). Her novel, Green Music (2001), Equipoisally combines Afterlife fantasy [see The ...
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 ...