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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 ...
Animatrix, The
Cycle of nine short Anime films (2003) by a variety of hands and studios under the Warner Brothers/Village Roadshow production umbrella, expanding the world of The Matrix (1999) as a novel experiment in Shared-World cinema. Two films, Kid and Final Flight of the Osiris, serve as direct prequels to The Matrix Reloaded ...
Byers, Sam
(1979- ) UK author whose first novel Idiopathy (2013), though not literally fantastic, engages in edge-of-the-present, extremely funny Satirical assaults on the British Media Landscape, and on the chatterati's morganatic relationship with the Internet in general. His second novel, Perfidious Albion (2018), moves his focus forward, into a post-Brexit ...
Wykes, Alan
(1914-1993) Prolific UK author, mainly of nonfiction, whose sf Satire Happyland (1952) depicts an arcadian fantasy-Island in which happiness is literally obtainable. A UK magnate turns the place into a holiday camp; a new kind of bomb finally eliminates it. The nonfiction H G Wells in the Cinema (1977) surveys all the films up to publication date based on H G Wells's fiction. [JC]
Adam, Paul
(1862-1920) French journalist, editor and author, mostly of historical novels through which he espoused strongly argued anarchist views. Of sf interest is Lettres de Malaisie ["Letters from Malaysia"] (November 1896-August 1897 La Revue Blanche; 1898; vt La Cité Prochaine ["The Next City"]: Lettres de Malaisie 1908) which described a totalitarian Dystopia occupying much of the interior of Borneo from 1850 onwards. ...
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 ...