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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.
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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 ...
Tiphaigne de la Roche, C F
(1729-1774) French author of some works of fantasy with Proto-SF elements, three of which were miscellaneously assembled as Amilec; Ou la graine d'hommes qui sert à peupler les planétes (1753; trans anon as Amilec; Or, the Seeds of Mankind 1753), Zamar, député à la Lune par Amilec ["Zamar, Delegated to the Moon by Amilec"] [for full subtitle see Checklist] (1754 2vols) and ...
Giant Spider Invasion, The
Film (1975). Group 75/Transcentury. Directed by Bill Rebane. Written by Robert Easton, Richard L Huff. Cast includes Steve Brodie, Alan Hale, Barbara Hale and Leslie Parrish. 76 minutes. Colour. / Noted by one critic, Michael Weldon, as the Monster Movie with the worst special effects since The Giant Claw (1957), this is fondly remembered as the one where the giant spider was built out of a modified ...
Television
The first section of this entry is roughly as it appeared in the 1993 second edition of the encyclopedia, with some added links to new third-edition entries for television sf within its scope. The second section, taking up the tale from the 1990s, offers a contrasting view. The third section briefly covers animated series. / 1. The first thing to understand about televised sf is that it has never been commercially successful (relative to the top programmes) on US television, ...
Clarke, Cassandra Rose
(1983- ) US author who began to publish work of genre interest with "The Cowboy's Wife" in Zahir for Summer 2009, as Cassandra Clarke; her Assassin's Curse sequence beginning with The Assassin's Curse (2012) is fantasy, heavy with adventures. She is of sf interest for some individual titles. The Mad Scientist's Daughter (2013) is set in a Near Future America which has suffered survived depopulation, ...
Robinson, Roger
(1943- ) UK computer programmer, bibliographer and publisher, active in UK Fandom for many years. The Writings of Henry Kenneth Bulmer (1983 chap; rev 1984 chap) is an exhaustive Bibliography of one of the most prolific sf writers, Kenneth Bulmer, and Who's Hugh?: An SF Reader's Guide to Pseudonyms (1987) is similarly exhaustive in its ...