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Sunday 26 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.
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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 ...
Ker, David
(1842-1914) UK author of Scots ancestry who became a tutor in Russia and was Daily Telegraph and New York Herald war correspondent with the Russian army in the 1870s. His stories for boys set in Central Asia include The Boy Slave in Bokhara (1874) and three Lost Race tales: The Lost City; Or, the Boy Explorers in Central Asia (16 October 1883-1 January 1884 Harper's Young People Illustrated Weekly; 1884), in which ...
Children of the Damned
Film (1963; vt Horror!). MGM. Directed by Anton M Leader. Written by Jack Briley, based on The Midwich Cuckoos (1957; rev 1958; vt Village of the Damned 1960) by John Wyndham. Cast includes Alan Badel, Barbara Ferris, Ian Hendry and Bessie Love. 90 minutes. Black and white. / This UK film is not a sequel to the successful Village of the Damned (1960); it is a ...
Connell, Adam
(1973- ) US author who, after an early career in the New York stock market, published an sf novel, Counterfeit Kings (2004), a noirish thriller, set on the Jovian moon Io (see Jupiter), whose protagonist must search for his world's missing king, a search complicated by a plethora of bodyguards known as Ringers who have been surgically altered so that they are indistinguishable from their monarch. [JC]
Oxenham, John
Pseudonym of UK lay figure in the Congregationalist Church, poet, editor and author William Arthur Dunkerley (1852-1941); he was co-founder, with Robert Barr of The Idler. Many of his works – some of them now-unread fantasies – served to advance his religious convictions. Two novels are of sf interest: ...
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 ...