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Wednesday 22 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 ...
Francis, Matthew
(1956- ) UK poet, editor and author whose sf novel, Whom (1989), is set in an America secretly governed by a vast Computer and ravaged by fundamentalist anxieties (see Religion); the tale itself includes Timeslip episodes, plus some mild-mannered Satire, and intimations of that Holocaust and rapture will soon ...
Contact [2]
Russian animated film (1978; original title Kontakt). Soyuzmultfilm. Directed by Vladimir Tarasov. Written by Alexander Kostinsky. 10 minutes. Colour. / An artist wandering the countryside rests by a lake: as he hums to himself, a Spaceship arrives. Its pilot – a Shapeshifting fluorescent triangle-eyed slug-like ...
Brizzolara, John
(1950- ) US author who began publishing work of genre interest with "The Opposite House" for Weird Tales in Fall 1981 with Diane Brizzolara; over the next several years he published fairly frequently in the magazines, and released one sf novel, Empire's Horizon (1989), a Space Opera whose protagonists, on a rebel planet, challenge the Terran Empire (see ...
Edogawa Ranpo
Main pseudonym of Japanese mystery author Tarō Hirai (1894-1965), sometimes romanized as Edogawa Rampo, a name derived from the Japanese pronunciation of Edgar Allan Poe, who was his literary idol. An amateur translator of Arthur Conan Doyle during his studies in economics at Waseda University, Edogawa began publishing detective stories and macabre chillers commencing with "Ni-sen ...
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 ...