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Sunday 19 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 ...
Moxley, F Wright
(1889-1937) US lawyer and author whose interesting though somewhat overblown Satire, Red Snow (1930), tells of a snowlike precipitation, a Disaster which causes worldwide sterility in 1935, and of the subsequent social breakdown. The tale itself comprises an almost telegraphic Future History told through the experiences of one individual who survives everyone else on the planet. Finally, ...
Stasis Field
A variation on the traditional sf Force Field which provides an advanced form of Suspended Animation, first introduced in Robert A Heinlein's Beyond This Horizon (April-May 1942 Astounding as by Anson MacDonald; 1948). Time does not pass within such a field and its living contents will emerge, when the field ceases to ...
Computer Wargame
Term used by this encyclopedia to describe a form of Videogame descended (sometimes quite remotely) from the Wargame. The subject of the Computer Wargame is War, but (unlike First Person Shooters) success does not depend on reaction speed and manual dexterity. Instead, the gameplay is focused on intellectual contests of strategy and tactics; real time variants typically ...
Michels, Christine
(1957- ) Canadian author of several romantic Space Operas. To Share a Sunset (1990) with Bernice Carstensen (? - ), writing together as Sharice Kendyl, is a Planetary Romance set on a planet whose habitable portions are threatened by a great Wastelands, which the protagonists must cross while becoming involved with one another. ...
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 ...