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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 ...
West, Rebecca
Pseudonym of UK journalist and author Cicily Isabel Fairfield Andrews (1892-1983), H G Wells's partner 1913-1923; she also wrote as by Lynx. She began to publish her astute and polemical nonfiction around 1911; her first novel, The Return of the Soldier (1918), which stretches its nonfantastic mode to the limit, stands as a very early response to the profound trauma of World War One. The soldier, who is a victim of ...
Raines, Theron
(1925-2012) US literary agent and author in whose sf novel, The Singing: A Fable about What Makes us Human (1988), a team of Martians crashes its UFO into the Guggenheim Museum in New York, where one of them, according to plan, meets and impregnates the human girl through whose eyes the tale is told. Both sides get what they need: for Mars new blood, and for the Earth unsubtle flattery of our tough and ...
Clinton, George
(?1940- ) US funk musician, famous for his two connected groups, Parliament and Funkadelic. Many of the musicians from these collectives played on albums released under Clinton's name as solo albums. Computer Games (1982) has been especially heavily sampled by subsequent hip-hop and funk acts (the track "Atomic Dog" in particular); and the title track of You Shouldn't-Nuf Bit Fish ...
von Braun, Wernher
(1912-1977) German-born engineer and rocket scientist who notoriously led the Peenemünde team that developed Rocket technology for Nazi Germany before and during World War Two, leading to the V-2 or Vergeltungswaffe 2 ["Vengeance Weapon 2"] rocket-powered missile used against London and other Allied targets 1944-1945. As a Colonel in the Nazi SS, he has been accused of ...
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 ...