SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Sunday 19 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 17 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 ...
Freeman, Gillian
(1929-2019) UK author active from around 1955; she is of sf interest for The Leader (1966), set in the kind of Near Future Dystopian UK threatened, as not infrequently in novels of this category published in post-war UK, by the rise of a fascist nonentity through an increasingly ruthless exploitation of racial and ethnic prejudices to promote his Britain First party. The Undergrowth of Literature (1967), ...
Krasnostein, Alisa
(? - ) Australian environmental scientist (now retired), critic, editor, reviewer and podcaster who won a Ditmar Award in 2007 as Best New Talent. In 2004 she set up the review website Aussie Specfic in Focus! which she ran until 2012, and ran both an early shared world webzine called New Ceres (2 issues 2006-2007) and a Young Adult fiction webzine ...
SFRA Newsletter
US Digest-format magazine, the official newsletter, mostly monthly, of the Science Fiction Research Association; founded 1971, current, 215 issues to January/February 1995, edited by Fred Lerner (1971-1974), Beverly Friend (1974-1978), Roald Tweet (1978-1981), Elizabeth Anne Hull (1981-1984), Richard W Miller (1984-1987), Robert A ...
Herbert, Brian
(1947- ) US author, son of Frank Herbert, who began publishing sf with his third book and first novel, Sidney's Comet: Being an Account of the Remarkable Events Which Occurred During the Approach of the Great Garbage Comet (1983), a comic Satire which launched the short Garbage Chronicles series; the eponymous Comet, composed of human garbage, threatens Earth in ...
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 ...