SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Monday 20 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 ...
Weird Tales
Legendary US weird-fiction magazine which originally ran for 31 years and has since had a number of revivals in a variety of forms, which are subdivided below starting with the original magazine. / 1. US magazine, 279 issues March 1923 to September 1954, published initially in Chicago by Rural Publishing Corporation March 1923 to May/July 1924 and Popular Fiction Company November 1924 to October 1938; then relocated to New York with Short Stories Inc November 1938 to September 1954; ...
Scientific Thrillers
Australian publication which may be regarded either as a Chapbook series or a Magazine: Digest format, monthly November 1948 to May 1952, mostly undated, initially published by Associated General Publications, Sydney, company name changed to Transport Publications from #3 (January 1949). 43 issues in all; page count varied from 32pp to 52pp. The uncredited editors were Alister Innes and Donald H Beard. Most ...
Squires, Susan
(? - ) US author, mostly of paranormal romances of little direct sf interest, though some of her tales competently incorporate sf into the surge, an example being the Near Future Body Electric (2002), whose disaffected female protagonist creates an AI whose personality inhabits a Cyberpunk-inflected Virtual Reality. Very ...
Mellon, Mark
(? - ) US lawyer and author whose first novel, Escape from Byzantium (2009), is fantasy whose protagonist, Simon Rosencreutz, seems to have nothing to do with Rosicrucianism; Napoleon Concerto: A Novel in Three Movements (2010) is an Alternate History tale in which the Napoleonic Empire and Great Britain are deadlocked after years of War, with neither able to gain an ...
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 ...