SF Encyclopedia Home Page
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 ...
Delap, Richard
(1942-1987) US editor, reviewer and author who entered the sf world as a fan and soon began to publish book reviews, beginning with pieces in the Fanzine Granfalloon and contributing to "The Future in Books" column in Amazing Stories during 1959-1960. In Delap's F & SF Review he created a valuable review organ, whose folding was regretted. As a reviewer he was highly visible, being ...
Imperialism
Throughout its history, from its Proto SF origins until well into the twentieth century, sf has had a close and complex involvement with the themes of colonialism and empire. It is indeed a relationship so intimate and accustomed that it has not evoked sufficient attention as a separate issue; early editions of this encyclopedia, for instance, had no entry on the subject, though germane comments could be found dispersed throughout the text, often associated in one ...
Lindsey, Johanna
(1952-2019) German-born US author of romance novels, mostly with historical settings, which regularly appeared on the New York Times bestseller list; the first was Captive Bride (1977) [not listed below]. Lindsey is of sf interest for the Ly-San-Ter trilogy opening with Warrior's Woman (1990), whose tough yet virginal female protagonist goes on an interstellar quest (with a wisecracking AI sidekick) to free her world's women from ...
Woodring, Jim
(1952- ) American cartoonist, Comic book artist and author. Prone to hallucinations when young, Woodring dropped out of college and after a stint as a garbage collector joined Ruby-Spears Productions as an animator, working on such low-quality shows as Rubik the Amazing Cube (1983) (see Hanna-Barbera) and Turbo Teen (1984-1985), about a teenager who could transform into a sports car. ...
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 ...