SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Wednesday 22 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 ...
Swift, Morrison I
(1856-1946) US political thinker, agitator and author whose early anarchism, which brought him fame, decayed in his old age into antisemitic fascism; his novels come from his earlier years. He published three novels of some interest: A League of Justice; Or, Is It Right to Rob the Robbers? (1893) is set in a Near Future America bedevilled by inequality, but transformed into a just society by the eponymous league, which robs the rich and gives to the ...
Society
Film (1989). Wild Street Pictures. Directed by Brian Yuzna. Written by Woody Keith, Rick Fry. Cast includes Devin DeVasquez, Ben Meyerson and Bill Warlock. 99 minutes. Colour. / "Society" (as in the upper classes) is an Alien race, parasitic on humanity (as in the poor), that has been around as long as humans have, but we learn this only at the end. In the tradition of 1980s schlock/surrealist horror cinema (e.g., Re-Animator ...
E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial
Film (1982). Universal. Directed and coproduced by Steven Spielberg. Written by Melissa Mathison. Cast includes Drew Barrymore, Peter Coyote, Robert McNaughton, Henry Thomas and Dee Wallace. 115 minutes. Colour. / 10-year-old Elliott (Thomas) meets an alien, "E.T.", who has been accidentally left outside Los Angeles when his spacecraft and its crew – which we infer includes his parents – is forced to depart rapidly to avoid a search ...
Lucas, E V
(1868-1938) UK editor, publisher (chairman of Methuen from 1924) and author who produced a huge number of "weekend" essays and sketches, many of them originally published in Punch over a span of thirty years, and also a number of tamely belletristic travel books. Typically, the Dictionary of National Biography does not refer by name to his early Parodies which, all the same, unlike the bulk of his 180 books (almost none of which are ...
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 ...