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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 ...
Out of This World Adventures
1. US Pulp magazine. Two issues, July 1950 and December 1950, published by Avon Periodicals; edited by Donald A Wollheim. The first issue included an impressive line-up of authors: A Bertram Chandler, Ray Cummings, Lester del Rey, Kris Neville, Mack ...
Frewer, Ellen Elizabeth
(1848-1940) UK author and translator, active before the end of the nineteenth century; her translations of Jules Verne were fuller and less tampered-with than most other versions of Verne during the years she worked on his books. It has been suggested that her financial independence allowed her to be firm on maintaining the integrity of her work. Frewer's later life seems to have been lived in private. [JC]
Sympson, Revd Joseph
(1715-1807) UK minister – Vicar of Wythburn – and author, a friend of William Wordsworth (1770-1850), whose son, Joseph Sympson (? -? ) was also a poet. The elder Sympson's book-length poem, Science Revived; Or, the Vision of Alfred: A Poem in Eight Books (1802), though essentially a fantasy of history, has some Proto SF interest when the spirit of Alfred the Great is transported to another ...
Casewit, Curtis W
(1922-2002) German-born author, in US from 1948; linguistically fluent, he did military service with the French Army in World War Two, later serving as an interpreter for the British Army. Almost all of his work was nonfiction, much of it about skiing; he began publishing work of genre interest with an sf story, "The Mask", for Weird Tales in March 1952. His sf novel, The Peacemakers (1960), depicts conflicting societies in a virtually depopulated ...
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 ...