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.
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 ...
Blur
UK indie band formed in 1989 by Damon Albarn (1968- ), Graham Coxon (1969- ), Alex James (1968- ) and Dave Rowntree (1964- ). Their first album, Leisure (1991), was an echo of dying genres from the Eighties but their next three albums would come to define the Britpop movement of the 1990s. Lyrically, singer Albarn was primarily known during this period as a social satirist (see ...
Up
Animated film (2009). Pixar/Walt Disney Pictures. Directed by Pete Docter. Written by Bob Peterson and Docter, based on a story by Docter, Peterson and Thomas McCarthy. Cast includes Edward Asner, Jordan Nagai and Christopher Plummer. 93 minutes. Colour. / A Lost World adventure with Steampunk flourishes, Up is most notable for containing two of the most effective tear-jerking scenes in cinema history. The first ...
Gu Shi
(? - ) Chinese author and urban planner who first came to prominence around 2011, with a number of stories that remarkably worked within the local tradition of didactic science fiction (see China), and yet also asserted a poignant notion of the likely emotional and ethical impact of scientific progress. Critics have parsed this as a particularly "female" reaction to the boys' club of the genre in China, although Gu herself has ...
Cavallaro, Brittany
(1986- ) US poet and author whose Girl-King (coll of linked poems 2015 chap) effectively comprises a book-length narrative whose young female subjects interweave their life-stories, a mosaic of careers in living that often engages in the fantastic; Unhistorical (coll 2019 chap) contains an apocryphal narrative featuring Sherlock Holmes and Watson in Scotland. Her Young Adult ...
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 ...