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Wednesday 22 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 ...
Shirrefs, Mark
(1952- ) Australian scriptwriter and author, generally in collaboration with John Thomson (1953- ), with whom he has adapted his Young Adult Television series, the first being the Tomorrow sequence: The Girl from Tomorrow (1990) adapts The Girl from Tomorrow (1989), and Tomorrow's End (1991) ...
Astronaut's Wife, The
Film (1999). New Line Cinema/Mad Chance. Directed and written by Rand Ravich. Cast includes Nick Cassavetes, Johnny Depp, Samantha Eggar, Clea Duvall, Joe Morton, Donna Murphy, Charlize Theron. 109 minutes. Colour. / There is little to say about the sad schizophrenic gap between the competent flow of Rand Ravich's direction of The Astronaut's Wife and the lame Cliché-ridden retro-bondage that slowly hamstrings the actual story. This slow ...
Kosinski, Jerzy
(1933-1991) Polish author born Josek Lewinkopf – his father gave him the name Jerzy Kosinski to avoid Nazi Jew-hunts – whose experiences as a child in World War Two inspired in his first novel, The Painted Bird (1965; rev 1976), though this hallucinated picaresque – set in the surrealistic landscape of war-devastated Poland, and whose child protagonist is driven mute by his experiences – does not directly reflect ...
Cordell, Alexander
Pseudonym of Ceylon-born UK author George Alexander Graber (1914-1997); after World War Two he lived in Wales, a land to which he became intensely loyal, and where much of his non-fantastic fiction is set. The Bright Cantonese (1967; vt The Deadly Eurasian 1968) combines doomed romance and nuclear Disaster with an intensity reminiscent of the early Geoffrey Household, as the eponymous female Red ...
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 ...