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
Sponsor of the day: Janine G Stinson
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 ...
Montague, C E
(1867-1928) UK editor and journalist, with the Manchester Guardian from 1890 to 1925, a span only broken by active service in World War One; as an author he is of interest for his Future War Satire, Right Off the Map (1927), in which two Ruritanian republics, Porto and Ria, are pitted against one another at the behest of a profiteer, to little avail; ...
Fischer, P J
(? - ) US author whose first novel Julia and the Dream Maker (2003) – first of a projected series – follows three young experimenters whose discoveries lead to AI and portals into other worlds. [JC]
Rand, Peter
(1942- ) US author of The Time of the Emergency (1977), an sf novel set in a world subsequent to a nuclear Holocaust – but how much farther into the future it is hard to distinguish – so that the abstract desert and surreal hotel that provide a stage for the four protagonists' shattered behaviour may in fact be described as inhabiting a Ruined Earth. [JC]
Arnold, Edwin L
(1857-1935) UK author, son of the poet and journalist Sir Edwin Arnold (1832-1904), a poet and popularizer of Buddhism (his book-length mystical poem The Light of Asia was popular during his lifetime) who is sometimes confused with his son. Arnold's own fantasies include three Reincarnation tales clearly influenced by his father, who introduced the first of these: The Wonderful Adventures of Phra the Phoenician (1890; vt ...
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 ...