SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 21 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
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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 ...
Edric, Robert
Pseudonym of UK author Gary Edric Armitage (1956- ), who began his career as G E Armitage with a nonfantastic novel, A Season of Peace (1985), continuing for two decades during which at least fifteen more novels, all but the first as Robert Edric, were released. They are all nonfantastic, though The Broken Lands (1992), about the fatal Arctic expedition headed by Sir John Franklin (1786-1847), pushes to the edge of ...
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, The [game]
Videogame (1984). Infocom. Designed by Douglas Adams, Steve Meretzky. Platforms: AppleII, Atari8, C64, DOS, Mac (1984); AtariST (1985); Amiga, Amstrad (1986). / Hitchhiker is a text-based Adventure game, a variation on the theme established in the ...
Elliot, John
(1918-1997) UK author, primarily for television, who collaborated with Fred Hoyle on two serials, A for Andromeda and The Andromeda Breakthrough, and the subsequent novelizations under the same titles (1962 and 1964 respectively). He is not to be confused with the John Elliott (note different spelling) who wrote the anti-Chinese/Soviet political thriller ...
Herrick, Robert
(1868-1938) US academic, diplomat and author best known for The Master of the Inn (1908), whose eponymous hero cures the mentally ill by making them work hard while contemplating the purposelessness of life as our governors and religionists would have it. His one sf novel, Sometime (1933), set mostly in Africa 1000 years hence, describes en passant the visit of some Africans to a post-ice-age North America (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 ...