SF Encyclopedia Home Page
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.
Site updated on 20 January 2025
Sponsor of the day: Glasgow 2024 (Worldcon)
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 ...
Wondrous Web Worlds
US Anthology series published annually from 2001 to the present and edited by J Alan Erwine. The first two volumes were published by Pro Mart Publishing, Carmichael, California, but all subsequent volumes have been published by Sam's Dot Publishing, Cedar Rapids, Iowa. The anthology selects the stories and poems voted by readers as the best in Sam's Dot's Online Magazines: The ...
Dorn, Michael
(1952- ) US actor – in various Star Trek series and one film, and elsewhere – and author of an sf novel, Time Blender (1997) with Hilary Hemingway and Jeffry P Lindsay, whose title accurately describes the consequences of an archaeologist's discovery of a time portal (see Timeslip) in which various epochs come ...
Dianetics
According to its adherents a science, according to its disbelievers a Pseudoscience, founded by L Ron Hubbard, at the time a pulp writer whose main market was the sf magazines. Hubbard's sf had always emphasized the powers of the mind and deployed protagonists who maintained to the end a heroic stance against a corrupt Universe. The former interest was translated into real-life terms in the late 1940s, and the latter vision ...
Horsnell, Horace
(1882-1949) UK playwright, drama critic and author, active in English literary circles from around 1910. His sf novel, Man Alone (1940), describes the experiences of the Last Man on Earth as he wanders through London after the final, depopulating Disaster. Castle Cottage (1940) is a ghost story and The Cool of the Evening (1942) a rather gentle ...
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 ...