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Saturday 18 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 17 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 ...
Dath, Dietmar
(1970- ) German editor and author, active from the mid-1990s (see Germany since 1990). Several of his earlier novels contain homages to sf, though sometimes remotely: Am Blinden Ufer ["On the Blind Side"] (2000) alludes within an apocalyptic frame to H P Lovecraft and Michael Moorcock; and Dirac (2006) is ...
Cozzens, James Gould
(1903-1978) US author, best known for his novels of contemporary American life, including Guard of Honor (1948), for which he won the Pulitzer Prize, and By Love Possessed (1957), which brought him considerable fame. One of the passengers in the doomed liner (see Ship of Fools) that gives its name to S S San Pedro (August 1930 Scribner's Magazine; 1931) is a malign doctor, a ...
Leggett, M D
(1821-1896) US lawyer, doctor, educator, soldier, Commissioner of Patents under President Grant, businessman (founder of one of the firms that became General Electric) and author A Dream of a Modest Prophet (1890), which describes a Christian Utopia on Mars, whose inhabitants have embraced peace after the example of their own Christ Messiah, who seems essentially identical to Earth's. [JC]
MF DOOM
(1971-2020) The most widely used and best-known pseudonym (always styled in all capitals) of UK-born rapper Dumile Thompson, in the US from childhood, and a enduring influence on underground hip-hop. His mask-wearing stage persona derived from the Marvel Comics character Victor Von Doom (Doctor Doom), upon whom he based another of his pseudonyms, Viktor Vaughn. It was under this name that he recorded his sf album, Vaudeville Villain (2003), ...
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 ...