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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 ...
Maddoux, Marlin
(1933-2004) US radio talk host, founder of International Christian Media and the National Center for Freedom and Renewal, and author whose The Seal of Gaia: A Novel of the Antichrist (1998) conceives in Christian terms of apocalyptic events in a 2033 world run by a single government in the name of Gaia, but whose secret agenda (see Paranoia) is evil. [JC]
Cowie, Donald
(1911-2006) UK author (blind since 1984), in New Zealand from 1928, in UK from 1934, resident in Switzerland from 1964, who has also written as Aldwyn Abberley, Julian Mountain, R F St B Pytchely and Rufus Stone; he was the author of several crabbed Future History visions of a century in decay. Prose & Verse (coll 1945) as with Julian Mountain contains some fantasy stories; of sf interest are ...
Morris, James
(? - ) UK author of The Escapist (2005), a Near Future thriller set in a Cyberpunk-tinted venue, which the street-wise hero has little real difficulty in negotiating as he tracks down a roge AI. [JC]
Liston, Edward
(1900-1986) UK-born physician, flight surgeon and author, naturalized as a US citizen in 1932; in his Lost Race novel, The Bowl of Night (1948), a flight surgeon crash-lands in the Mexican jungle, where he discovers a Mayan civilization accessible only through passages Underground; the Mayans, though totally out of touch with the outside world, have developed science and Technology to ...
Nicholls, Peter
(1939-2018) Australian editor and author, primarily a critic and historian of sf through his creation and editing of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction [see below]; resident in the UK 1970-1988, in Australia from 1988; worked as an academic in English literature (1962-1968, 1971-1977), scripted television documentaries, was a Harkness Fellow in Film-making (1968-1970) in the USA, worked as a publisher's editor (1982-1983), often broadcast film and book reviews on BBC Radio from 1974 and ...