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 ...
Texhnolyze
Japanese animated tv series (2003). Madhouse. Directed by Hiroshi Hamasaki. Written by Chiaki J. Konaka. Voice cast includes Satoshi Haga, Takashi Inoue, Shizuka Itou, Shizumi Niki, Kaijiro Tanaka and Hiroshi Tsuchinada. 22 25-minute episodes. Colour. / The Underground City of Lux is controlled by various gangs, several of which are united under the Oruganu, led by Keigo ...
Duncan, Alexandra
(? - ) US author, resident in North Carolina, who began to publish work of genre interest with "Kinderkochen" in Ravens in the Library: Magic in the Bard's Name (anth 2009) edited by Sandra Buskirk and Phil (as SatyrPhil) Brucato. Her Young Adult Salvage Universe sequence opens with Salvage (2014), an adventure beginning in a Far-Future ...
Hypnosis
This mildly controversial and frequently misrepresented technique of Psychology – also known in its early days as mesmerism – is generally depicted in sf as very much more rapid and reliable than any known medical hypnosis. An extreme case is Edgar Allan Poe's "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar" (December 1845 American Whig Review), whose titular subject dies but remains conscious even in decay until the ...
Tompkins, Walker A
(1909-1988) US author, mostly of Westerns; he is of sf interest for Ozar the Aztec (January 1933-June 1933 Street and Smith's Top-Notch all sections under the House Name Valentine Wood; fixup 1935), a Lost Race tale whose inhabitants, under the leadership of Ozar, survive in the contemporary West. [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 ...