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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.
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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 ...
DeSoto, Rafael
(1904-1992) Puerto Rican-born US artist, whose name was variously rendered as Raphael De Soto, Rafael M de Soto, and R de Soto; he may have produced a few pulp covers under the name Irene Endris. After the death of his father, DeSoto was sent to a Catholic seminary, but his obvious artistic talents directed him toward a career in art rather than the priesthood. In about 1923 he came to New York and spent some years getting what experience he could in various studios before, in 1930, signing up ...
Cowie, Donald
(1911-2006) UK author (blind since 1984), in New Zealand from 1928, in UK from 1934, resident in Switzerland from 1964, who has also written as Aldwyn Abberley, Julian Mountain, R F St B Pytchely and Rufus Stone; he was the author of several crabbed Future History visions of a century in decay. Prose & Verse (coll 1945) as with Julian Mountain contains some fantasy stories; of sf interest are ...
Appleby, Steven
(1956- ) UK/Canadian cartoonist, holding dual nationality, whose mildly surreal sf comic strip Captain Star appeared in New Musical Express from 1984, and subsequently in The Observer, Die Zeit and SFX 1998-1999. Early adventures of Captain Star's dysfunctional crew on their Spaceship The Boiling Hell are assembled as Rockets: A Way of Life by Captain J. Star (graph coll ...
Hawthorne, Nathaniel
(1804-1864) US author, father of Julian Hawthorne, whose work in the literatures of the fantastic – a surprisingly high proportion of his oeuvre – concentrates supernatural fiction, much of this material being rationalized, however, in sf terms. One of the formative figures in US literature, Hawthorne was intrigued throughout his writing career by themes that would become common to sf. His extensive notebooks outline dozens of projected sf works ...
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 ...