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Saturday 18 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 17 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 ...
Hodge, T Shirby
Pseudonym of US author Roger Sherman Tracy (1841-1926). His sf novel, The White Man's Burden: A Satirical Forecast (1915), is set in 5000 CE, by which period the warlike and primitive white races (see Race in SF) have been restricted to North America while, in Black-dominated Africa, anarchism and scientific genius have generated a Utopian world. A white Invasion suffers ignominious defeat, and ...
Crumey, Andrew
(1961- ) Scottish journalist, editor and author whose first novel, Music, in a Foreign Language (1994), which inaugurates the extremely loose Music series, is set in an abstractly conceived Near Future Dystopian Britain, where a series of recursively ludic events – some conducted through the means of imaginary books (Crumey's oeuvre being full of them) – decomposes the ...
Gailey, Sarah
(1990- ) US author whose involvement in American Fandom led to a 2018 Hugo award for best fan writer. They began to publish work of genre interest with "Stars" in The Colored Lens for September 2015. The River of Teeth sequence beginning with River of Teeth (2017) is set in an Alternate History America whose 1850s ...
Buckner, M M
(? - ) US author and environmental activist (she has done work for the World Wildlife Fund) whose first three sf novels are set on an exceedingly grim but realistic planet Earth, though her excessively intricate plotting tends to divert attention from the harshness of the Near Future/moderately distant future she posits. HyperThought (2001) and War Surf (2005) – the latter won 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 ...