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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 ...
Spencer, John
(1944-2002) UK author, rock musician and one-time art-agency director, founding what would become Young Artists, a major UK agency for preponderantly sf/fantasy artists. His first sf novel, The Electronic Lullaby Meat Market (1975), in a manner somewhat reminiscent of Mick Farren, sets a quirky thriller in a violently hyperbolic Near-Future world described in sex-charged terms reminiscent of the late-1960s ...
Making Mr Right
Film (1987). Orion. Directed by Susan Seidelman. Written by Floyd Byars, Laurie Frank. Cast includes Ann Magnuson and John Malkovich. 98 minutes. Colour. / The cold, rational, shy Scientist played by Malkovich has designed, in his own image, Ulysses the Android (actually in part a Robot), also played by Malkovich, for use as a space pilot. Public-relations expert Frankie (Magnuson), whose love ...
Cranford, Robin
(1923- ) South African author, later in the UK; My City Fears Tomorrow (1961), a non-fantastic tale set in Johannesburg, thematically precedes Leave Them Their Pride (1962), which is set in the same general venue in 1975, and deals with the Invasion of South Africa by freed Blacks, and the decision of those whites who survive to accept relegation to a small "homeland". [JC]
From Beyond
Film (1986). Taryn/Empire. Executive producer Charles Band. Directed by Stuart Gordon. Written by Dennis Paoli, loosely based on "From Beyond" (June 1934 The Fantasy Fan) by H P Lovecraft. Cast includes Jeffrey Combs, Barbara Crampton, Ken Foree, Carolyn Purdy-Gordon and Ted Sorel. 85 minutes. Colour. / With three of the same leading players, the same production team, and ...
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 ...