SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 21 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: The Telluride Institute
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 ...
Williams, Raymond
(1921-1988) Welsh author, Professor of Drama at Cambridge University, literary and cultural critic, famous for incisive studies of the interconnections between literature and society. His 1956 essay "Science Fiction" (December 1956 The Highway), republished in Science Fiction Studies in November 1988, distinguishes three main kinds of contemporary sf: Utopia, doomsday (see Disaster; ...
Meredith, Edgar
(? -? ) UK author of a Scientific Romance, Our Stranger: A Kinemato-Romance (1936), in which the Time theories of J W Dunne are used to shape the relationship between the evolving human race, as depicted in the London of 1971, and their mentors, who inhabit a Utopia in the ...
Wiesner, David
(1956- ) US illustrator and graphic artist, almost all of his work being designed for young audiences; he has received much esteem and several awards for this work, most of which falls outside the remit of this encyclopedia and is not listed below. He is of strong if indirect sf interest for Sector 7 (graph 1999), a wordless tale whose young protagonist is taken by an animate cloud from the top of the Empire State Building (see ...
Elements
Although little excitement is now aroused by the addition of yet another short-lived heavy element to the Periodic Table of Physics [see links below], new elements with extraordinary properties used to be highly popular sf devices. Public awareness of radioactivity led to much fictional exploitation of unstable, Ray-emitting nuclides, especially radium itself, and reawakening of interest in the old theme 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 ...