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Friday 24 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 24 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 ...
Hartman, Emerson B
(?1888/1889-1969) US author whose Lunarchia: That Strange World Beneath the Moon's Crust (1937) began a projected six-volume interplanetary sequence in the Edgar Rice Burroughs vein with the discovery of a colourful civilization within the Moon. No further volumes appeared. In The Giant of the Sierras (1945) a Lost World is discovered in California inhabited by giants, ...
Foot, Michael
(1913-2010) UK politician and author, a Labour member of Parliament from 1945 to 1992, and leader of the Labour party from 1980 to 1983; he resigned this position after losing the 1983 election against Margaret Thatcher. Much of his early journalism was written as by Cato, under which name he attacked the British government's appeasement policy towards Nazi Germany; his one fiction of sf interest, ...
Anson, August
Pseudonym of UK author Reginald William Malyon Gibbs (1878-1942), who under his own name published numerous mathematics references and textbooks. His sf novel as by Anson, When Woman Reigns (1938), transports its protagonist to first the twenty-sixth and then the thirty-sixth century. Author and hero take a rather dim view of these two periods, because in both men are subservient to women (see Feminism). [JC]
Harrison, Craig
(1942- ) UK-born playwright and author, in New Zealand from 1966, whose work embodies consistently anti-racist themes. The material initially expounded in the play Tomorrow Will Be a Lovely Day (performed 1974; 1975) is developed in Broken October: New Zealand, 1985 (1976), which depicts an authoritarian Dystopia, with Maoris able to travel only when issued with passes; the American government colludes with the ...
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 ...