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.
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 ...
Wilkins, Lura M
(1879-1963) US author whose awkwardly mixed-genre "Over There": Chronicles of an English Engineer "Gone West" (1935) is presented as its author's stenographic recording of reminiscences of the horrors of World War One on the part of a British engineer. His narrative also describes his discovery of an Underground Utopia, whose entrance is on the dark side of the ...
Spencer, Leonard G
Ziff-Davis House Name used at least twice by Robert Silverberg and Randall Garrett in collaboration, for the stories "The Beast With 7 Tails" (August 1956 Amazing) and "The Girl from Bodies, Inc." (October 1956 Fantastic). A third Spencer story, "The Man with the X-Ray Eyes" (February 1957 ...
Stow, Percy
(1876-1919) UK filmmaker. Stow worked with Cecil Hepworth (1874-1953) at the latter's Hepworth Studios between 1901-1903, then co-founded the Clarendon Film Company in 1904. He directed over 290 short films before his early death in 1919. He became identified with trick films, using such ploys as double exposure, stop motion and reversing the film. Early films were typically very short, to set up and execute a visual gag. They grew longer over the years (though usually staying well under 10 ...
Isola degli Uomini Pesce, L'
Film (1978; vt Island of Mutations; vt Screamers). Dania-Medusa/New World. Directed by Sergio Martino (and Joe Dante, US version only). Written by Martino, Sergio Donati, Cesare Frugoni. Cast includes Barbara Bach, Claudio Cassinelli, Joseph Cotten, Beryl Cunningham, Mel Ferrer (US version only), Richard Johnson and Cameron Mitchell (US version only). 99 minutes, cut to 91 minutes. Colour. / This is a wild Italian schlock picture, seemingly ...
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 ...