SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Sunday 26 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 ...
Kayser, Martha
(1871-? ) US author whose Utopia, The Aerial Flight to the Realm of Peace (1922), features a form of Space Flight (see also Balloons) to a planet much like Earth except that everyone is united in a kind of conflict-free family inspired by conflict-free worship in a single Supreme Being. Faith (1931; rev vt Heaven Is Here 1938 as M C Kayser) as ...
Williams, T Owen
(? - ) UK author of whom nothing is known beyond his contribution to the Robert Hale Limited sf list of A Month for Mankind (1970) – a novel in which UFOs prove to be crewed by Aliens from planet Boran who plan to take over the Earth via the usual Invasion. [JC/DRL]
Startling Stories
1. US Pulp magazine, 99 issues January 1939 to Fall 1955, published by Better Publications January 1939 to Winter 1955, and by Standard Magazines (really the same company) Spring to Fall 1955; edited by Mort Weisinger (January 1939-May 1941), Oscar J Friend (July 1941-Fall 1944), Sam Merwin Jr (Winter 1945-September 1951), Samuel ...
Haggard, H Rider
(1856-1925) UK civil servant, lawyer, agricultural expert and author. Haggard spent the years 1875-1881 in the Colonial Service in South Africa, where he gained much of the material for his fiction. On his return to the UK he read for the bar while at the same time beginning to produce novels and other work. With his third and fourth published novels, King Solomon's Mines (1885) and the even more successful She: A History of Adventure (2 October 1886-8 January 1887 ...
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 ...