SF Encyclopedia Home Page
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.
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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 ...
MacLaren, Bernard
(? - ) UK author whose sf novel Day of Misjudgment (1956) unusually represents the domination of society by Computers as more of a blessing than a curse, though the Walpurgisnacht setting of the tale may explain the reversal of values. [JC]
Brown, Slater
(1896-1997) US author, perhaps best known as "B", E E Cummings's cellmate in his famous memoir of World War One, The Enormous Room (1922). Brown's own writing career was relatively desultory, though he published at least two books of genre interest: The Talking Skyscraper (1945) is a children's tale about a New York skyscraper dissatisfied with its (his) lot; Spaceward Bound (1955) is a ...
Schutt, Bill
(? - ) US zoologist and author whose first book, Dark Banquet: Blood and the Curious Lives of Blood-Feeding Creatures (2008), is nonfiction. He is of sf interest for the R J MacCready sequence of Alternate History tales beginning with Hell's Gate (2016), all with J R Finch. The Jonbar Point for this version of the post- ...
Hitler Wins
For nearly three-quarters of a century it has been an enjoyable creative exercise to imagine what kind of Alternate History might have evolved had Germany won World War Two, and many novels and stories have been written to explore a hypothetical Axis victory; these tales almost always avoid any reference to the Final Solution, and cannot stand as examples of Holocaust Fiction, even by ...
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 ...