SF Encyclopedia Home Page
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 ...
Bott, Claire
(? - ) UK poet, journalist and author whose first novel is a tie remotely associated with the Doctor Who universe: Time Hunter: The Clockwork Woman (2004) comprises the surprisingly intense and sophisticated first-person narrative of the eponymous Android driven by clockwork, an image of fantasy Bondage [see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under ...
VGA Planets
Videogame (1992). Designed by Tim Wissemann. Platforms: DOS, Win. / VGA Planets is a turn-based 4X Game of galactic domination displayed on a two-dimensional map, broadly similar to its near contemporary Master of Orion (1993). ("VGA" refers to a type of graphics hardware; its use in early versions made the game more visually appealing than some of its competitors.) After ...
Morris, Desmond
(1928- ) UK painter, zoologist and author who remains best known for popularizations of sociobiology, arguing in The Naked Ape: A Zoologist's Study of the Human Animal (1967) that human behaviour could be usefully studied (though not comprehensively defined) through ethological comparisons with our primate relatives. He is of some sf interest for his only novel, Inrock (1983; exp 2013), whose young protagonist enters a surreal ...
High-Rise
Film (2016). Jeremy Thomas and Hanway Films, Film4 and BFI present in association with Northern Ireland Screen, Ingenious Media, Scope Pictures and S Films a Recorded Picture Company production. Directed by Ben Wheatley. Written by Amy Jump from the novel High-Rise (1975) by J G Ballard. Cast includes Julia Deakin, Luke Evans, Tom Hiddleston, Jeremy Irons, Sienna Miller and Louis Suc. 119 minutes. Colour. / "Later, as he sat on his ...
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 ...