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Friday 24 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 24 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 ...
Macdonald, James D
(1954- ) US author who began publishing work of genre interest with "The Little Prune That Couldn't Talk" for Apanage #62 in 1980, but who has worked almost exclusively since in partnership with Debra Doyle – they were married in 1978 – and we make no estimate of seniority in this partnership, as it gives every evidence of being seamless. They began publishing in collaboration with "Bad Blood" in Werewolves (anth ...
Thomas, Donald S
(1934- ) UK historian and author, much of whose early fiction was written as by Francis Selwyn, primarily the Sergeant Verity sequence of nonfantastic historical thrillers [not included in Checklist below]. His Sherlock Holmes sequence of tales beginning with The Secret Cases of Sherlock Holmes (1997) hovers innocuously at the edge of the fantastic (see Sherlock Holmes). Thomas is of sf interest for ...
Rae, Shana
(? - ) US author of a Near Future Sex novel, Open Legs (1977). [JC]
Mercier, Louis-Sébastien
(1740-1814) French playwright and author best known for his sixty or more plays and for his anecdotal journalism; he was active in the French Revolution, being imprisoned during the Terror. He is of interest for his exceedingly popular Proto SF tale, L'an deux mille quatre cent quarante: Rêve s'il en fût jamais (1771 Holland; trans William Hooper as Memoirs of the Year Two Thousand Five Hundred 1772 2vols UK; French text rev ...
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 ...