SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Sunday 26 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 ...
Harris, Rosemary
(1923-2019) UK writer who concentrated in her early career on non-fantastic novels for adults, beginning with The Summer-House (1956), but began to publish work of genre interest with "Hamlin" for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in September 1961. Much of her later work for Young Adult readers has been fantasy, beginning with the Reuben sequence comprising The Moon in the Cloud (1968), ...
Sentinel Worlds
Videogame series (from 1988). Designed by Karl Buiter. / Sentinel Worlds is the name used by this encyclopedia to refer to a sequence of two Computer Role Playing Games set in similar, though probably not identical, Space Opera milieux. Both borrow design elements from Space Sims, as do several other contemporary games including ...
Imaginary Voyages
A term much used in the Terminology of sf/fantasy critics, probably derived from the French, whose name for the genre is "voyages imaginaires". From this term was also derived Voyages extraordinaires, the overall series title used by publisher Jules Hetzel on the novels of Jules Verne. In this encyclopedia the theme is treated under ...
Hypnerotomachia
Russian short silent animated film (1992; vt Hypnerotomahia). Pilot Moscow Animation Studio. Directed by Andrei Svislotsky. Written by Andrei Kolpin and Oleg Kuzovkov. 8 minutes. Colour. / A man, desiccated in appearance with too many teeth and eyes like scars, dreams of dawn unfurling across a landscape covered in towers. His face in profile, its eye opens, revealing the iris to be the sun casting the light. The towers' shadows move with the sun's ...
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 ...