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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.
Site updated on 20 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 ...
Harper, Vincent
Pseudonym of Cuban-born US Episcopal minister (later Catholic priest and still later agnostic), lecturer, author and playwright Henry Austin Adams (1861-1931), who normally wrote as H Austin Adams. His sf novel, The Mortgage on the Brain: Being the Confessions of the Late Ethelbert Craft, MD (1905), describes an electric-shock treatment which alters personality beneficially and undermines many then-conventional views of the nature of the mind and ...
Talbot, Bryan
(1952- ) UK Comics artist and author, a prolific and at times excitingly experimental author/artist of much work since the beginning of the 1970s. After the nature of comics, most of his work escapes realistic trammels as with the material assembled as Bryan Talbot's Brainstorm: The Complete Chester P Hackenbush and Other Underground Classics (various original works here assembled; graph coll 1982). In ...
Delany, Martin R
(1812-1885) US physician, soldier, newspaper editor, author and advocate of Black rights, during a period when it was anything but safe for an African-American to speak out (though he was born free, his mother broke the law when she taught him to read and write). Success in each of his several fields of endeavour was fraught with risk, as his patent accomplishments deeply affronted white Americans; student protests caused his removal from medical studies at Harvard in 1850, with the connivance ...
Freedom Force
Videogame (2002). Irrational Games (IG). Designed by Robb Waters, Ken Levine. Platforms: Mac, Win. / Freedom Force is a Computer Role Playing Game which emphasizes tactical combat, set in the 1962 of Silver Age Superhero Comics. The tone is knowing and self aware; it is not so much a game based on 1960s comics as a game about them. 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 ...