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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 24 January 2025
Sponsor of the day: Joe Haldeman
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 ...
Booth, Pat
(1929-2018) New Zealand newspaper journalist (chiefly with The Auckland Star), local-area politician and author, one of whose sixteen books is sf: Long Night Among the Stars (1961) sensitively depicts the human interactions of the crew of a Spaceship in the Near Future. This author should not be confused with the female Pat Booth (1943-2009) who wrote All for Love (1993), a medical fantasy ...
Macowan, Norman
(1877-1961) UK actor and playwright, whose Near Future play, Glorious Morning: A Play in Three Acts (1938 chap), is set in the Graustarkian (see George Barr McCutcheon; Ruritania) state of Zagnira, where a Joan of Arc figure foments revolution. [JC]
Camilla, Queen of the Lost Empire
US Comic strip, probably created by Charles A Winter (the first story says "by CAW"). Though Camilla eventually became a female Tarzan (see Edgar Rice Burroughs) in the Sheena, Queen of the Jungle mould, her character was initially inspired by Ayesha or She from H Rider Haggard's She: A History of Adventure (2 ...
Tan, Shaun
(1974- ) Australian artist and author. As a teenage artist with an interest in science fiction, the precocious Tan published his first illustration in 1990, a strikingly coloured image of a kangaroo staring at an enormous Moon, for the cover of the second issue of the Australian magazine Aurealis; he also entered the Illustrators of the Future contest (see ...
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 ...