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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 ...
Retro Hugo
Retrospective Hugo awards may be voted under certain circumstances to fill the perceived gap left by a past World SF Convention at which no Hugos were presented. Besides the voting of the usual Hugos for the previous year's sf, a Worldcon committee may optionally allow its members to choose Retro Hugos which might have been but were not presented at the Worldcon of 50, 75 or 100 years previously ...
Tobey, Danny
(1976- ) US lawyer specializing in technology law with an emphasis on AI developments and medical issues, and author. In his first novel, The Faculty Club (2010), an elite American college is found to have gained its pre-eminence by the fact that, at its heart, a society of Secret Masters has from time immemorial been attempting to govern the world, partly through the enactment of voodoo rituals. ...
Richards, Alfred Bate
(1820-1876) UK editor of the Morning Advertiser from 1870 until his death, playwright and author. For many years he was active as a propagandist for UK military preparedness, but The Invasion of England (A Possible Tale of Future Times) (1870 chap), published privately, had little impact, partly because it lacked any effective narrative frame. It was in any case much less well-written than Lt.-Col. Sir George T Chesney's ...
Weltraumschiff 1 Startet
["Spaceship Number 1 Starts"] German short film (1940; vt Rocket Flight to the Moon). Bavaria Film. Directed and written by Anton Kutter. Cast includes Fritz Reiff and Carl Wery. 23 minutes. Black and white. / It is the Near Future (probably 1960; see below), with a crowd of people dwarfed by an immense Art Deco building. The press are lectured by the project's Technical Director (Reiff), who – after briefly ...
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 ...