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Thursday 23 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 ...
Mathers, Helen
Pseudonym of UK author Ellen Buckingham Mathews Reeves (1850-1920), who gained her greatest success with her first novel, Comin' thro the Rye (1875 3vols) as by H B M, but who remained prolific for many years; of sf interest are The Juggler and the Soul (1896) and The Sin of Hagar (1896), both melodramas involving Hypnosis, experiments in Medicine, and reanimation of the dead. [JC]
Contact [2]
Russian animated film (1978; original title Kontakt). Soyuzmultfilm. Directed by Vladimir Tarasov. Written by Alexander Kostinsky. 10 minutes. Colour. / An artist wandering the countryside rests by a lake: as he hums to himself, a Spaceship arrives. Its pilot – a Shapeshifting fluorescent triangle-eyed slug-like ...
Hartshorne, Henry
(1823-1897) US physician and author whose sf novella 1931: A Glance at the Twentieth Century (1881 chap) describes the Near Future in generally Utopian terms; America has solved its racial problems (see Race in SF), and solved other problems as well, including Pollution, through the application of high Technology. Perhaps ...
Fried, Seth
(? - ) US journalist and author who began to publish work of genre interest with "Frost Mountain Picnic Massacre" (31 August 2009 One Story), but much of whose short fiction is nonfantastic, though "Manhattan in 11031 AD" (11 June 2015 The New Yorker) is a deft Ruins-And-Futurity exercise. He is primarily of sf interest for his first novel, The Municipalists (2019), an ...
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 ...