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 20 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 ...
Lewis, Irwin
(1916-1996) US author who began publishing sf with "'To Invade New York ...'" in Analog for August 1963, a tale whose basic idea was incorporated into his first novel, The Day They Invaded New York (1964), in which invading Aliens confuse New Yorkers by fouling the Transportation systems of the great city. A second novel, The Day New York Trembled ...
Beast of Yucca Flats, The
US film (1961; vt Atomic Monster: The Beast of Yucca Flats; possibly also released as Girl Madness). Cardoza-Francis Productions. Directed and written by Coleman Francis. Cast includes Lanell Cado, Tor Johnson, Jim Oliphant and Bing Stafford. 54 minutes. Black and white. / A young woman (Cado) drying herself after a shower (see Fan Service) is strangled. We then cut to the arrival of "noted Scientist" Joseph ...
Germany since 1990
This entry describes the state of sf in Germany from the year 1990 onward. At present there are separate entries in this encyclopedia for Germany before 1990 (including East Germany) and Austria. These are to be restructured in the near future and joined by a more extensive entry on sf in {East Germany}. / Science fiction in the post-reunification Germany is still dominated by translations of the works of American and British authors. ...
Hawkins, Peter
(1926- ) UK bank clerk whose first sf sale was "Life Cycle" for New Worlds in Spring 1951; his 14 stories under his own name all appeared in that magazine and in Science Fantasy over the following decade. He published a routine sf adventure, The Plant from Infinity (1954) as by Karl Maras, a House Name. [JC]
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 ...