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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.
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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 ...
Conway, Troy
A House Name of the New York-based Paperback Library, whose chief though minor sf relevance is its use for the Coxeman soft-porn thrillers, mostly by Michael Avallone; these include some sf. Gardner F Fox also wrote two Coxeman books [see Checklist below]. Charles E Fritch may also have written one or more novels as Conway, but this is not ...
Glass, Mrs Charles Wilder
(1874-? ) US spirit medium and author, whose claim to have co-authored her three novels with a dead doctor whose spirit had been transported to Mars has not been corroborated; these novels, written in the belief that Percival Lowell had demonstrated the existence of canals on Mars, are Ruth's Marriage in Mars: A Scientific Novel (1912), Romance in Starland: A Scientific Novel (1915) and ...
Tuck, Donald H
(1922-2010) Australian bibliographer and industrial manager whose bibliographical labours in sf since the late 1940s were among the most extensive in the field since the pioneering work of Everett F Bleiler. In recent decades his publications have been partially superseded, but they comprise one of the foundation Bibliographies upon which later workers have built; the increasing sophistication and breadth of coverage of ...
Todd, Ruthven
(1914-1978) Scottish scholar, poet and author, in US from 1947-1958, and then Majorca; his most important nonfiction work, Tracks in the Snow: Studies in English Science and Art (1946), effectively argued the imaginative power – when conjoined – of the two subtitled categories, instancing at length the work of William Blake (1748-1827) and John Martin; as R T Campbell, he wrote several detective novels, beginning with Unholy Dying ...
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 ...