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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
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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 ...
Riesenberg, Sidney H
(1885-1971) US art curator, painter and illustrator, active mainly in the latter capacity from around 1905, his first work of genre interest being the cover for Harry Lincoln Sayler's The Airship Boys in the Barren Lands (1910), the first of several he executed for the Airship Boys series. During the later years of World War One, Riesenberg concentrated on poster art, mainly for the United States ...
Shirley, John
(1954- ) US author who began publishing sf with "The Word 'Random,' Deliberately Repeated" for Clarion (anth 1973) edited by Robin Scott Wilson, and who has performed as lead singer in rock bands, including the punk band Sado Nation. This background heavily influenced his first novel, the Dystopian Transmaniacon (1979) – the title is taken from a ...
Cities
The city is the focal point of our civilization, and images of the city of the future bring into sharp relief the expectations and fears with which we imagine the future of civilization. Disenchantment with metropolitan life was evident even while Utopian optimism remained strong, and became remarkably exaggerated in Dystopian images of the future. The growth of the cities during the Industrial Revolution created filthy slums where ...
Smith, Dale
(1976- ) UK author who began publishing work of genre interest with "The Puppet King" in Missing Pieces (anth 2001) edited by Shaun Lyon and Mark Phippen. He has since focused on Tie work for the Doctor Who universe, beginning with Heritage (2002) for the Doctor Who BBC Past Doctors subseries; and for the Time Hunter Shared World sequence ...
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 ...