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Sunday 19 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 ...
Richardson, Frank
(1870-1917) UK barrister and author, mostly of light fiction; he was the coiner of the term "face-fungus" to describe whiskers. The Bayswater Miracle (1903) mildly examines Gender issues through an Identity Exchange between a man and a woman; though it lacks any sf rationale, it is unusual in that the exchange is irreversible, with the reluctant male narrator, now physically female, marrying his sweetheart, who is ...
Baxter, Stephen
(1957- ) UK author, who has also signed his name Steve Baxter and S M Baxter. He began publishing sf with "The Xeelee Flower" for Interzone in Spring 1987, which with most of his earlier short work fits into his Xeelee Sequence, the main work of the first decade of his career, and significantly added to in later years. It constitutes an ambitious attempt at creating both – in the short term – a ...
Bisson, Terry
(1942-2024) US author who also worked as a New York publishing copy-writer. His first novel, Wyrldmaker: A Heroic Romance (1981), is a too rapidly told but intermittently dazzling Generation Starship tale told in the guise of a heroic fantasy (see also World Ship). With his second, Talking Man (1986), he came into his full powers as a novelist whose narrative voice was urgently and lucidly that ...
Iron Maiden
English heavy metal band formed in 1975 by bassist Stephen Harris (1956- ) and characterized by very loud, fast guitar work and the banshee vocals of lead singer Bruce Dickinson (1958- ). The band select promiscuously from established texts as premises for their songs, adapting many novels and (especially) films from war-story, mystery, historical, noir and sf genres. The latter, often inflected via a persistent interest in Satanism and occult ...
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 ...