SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Friday 24 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 ...
Tonkin, Peter
(1950- ) UK best known for the Mariner sequence of nonfantastic contemporary maritime thrillers, and Master of Defense sequence of nonfantastic thrillers set in Elizabethan times [neither series is listed below]; he is of some sf interest for his first novel, Killer (1979), about an unprecedentedly savage killer whale (see Horror in SF); The Journal of Edwin Underhill (1981) is a ...
Neo-Opsis Science Fiction Magazine
Canadian Semiprozine published and edited by Karl Johanson, Victoria, British Columbia, together with his wife Stephanie Johanson, who also serves as art director. Its first issue appeared in October 2003 and initially it maintained a schedule of roughly three issues per year but that has since become more irregular. It is printed in a slim Digest-size format on good quality coated stock, with attractive covers, so it is that rare ...
Diderot, Denis
(1713-1784) French philosopher, editor and author who edited and wrote (with Jean le Rond d'Alembert until 1759) the Encylopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, par une société de gens de lettres ["Encyclopedia: or a Systematic Dictionary of the Sciences, Arts, and Crafts, by a Company of Men of Letters"] (1751-1772 28vols), an Enlightenment masterpiece. Diderot's insistence on a single alphabet, avowedly ...
Baker, Scott
(1947- ) US-born author, who spent much of his career in France; for most of that career he has written fantasy and horror, some of it with distinction; his only sf novel is his first book, Symbiote's Crown (1978), a slyly intelligent though uneasily metaphysical Space Opera involving intricate hegiras through Parallel Worlds. Its French edition won the 1982 Prix Apollo for best SF novel ...
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 ...