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Thursday 23 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 ...
Malme, Arvid
(1943-1993) Norwegian teacher, painter and author. His first published sf story "Lampen lyser for deg" ["The Lamp Shines For You"] (1972 Science Fiction Magasinet #3-#4; see Nova – Fantastiske Fortellinger) was followed by works in Nova included in his only book of genre interest Dakrons bok: Boschiana ["The Book of Dakron: Boshiana"] (coll 1978). The storyteller is visiting the studio ...
Chavannes, Albert
(1836-1903) Swiss-born author, in US from 1848, of two linked Utopias, The Future Commonwealth; or, What Samuel Balcom Saw in Socioland (1892) and In Brighter Climes; or, Life in Socioland: A Realistic Novel (1893). In Socioland, a socialist enclave hidden somewhere in Africa, women are equal to men (see Feminism; Women in SF), though both engage in the nineteenth-century ...
Raynor, William
(1920-1994) US screenwriter and author of Freeze (1988) with Myles Wilder, a thriller in which Medicine and Cryonics mix ominously. Raynor also wrote the screenplays for Phantom from Space (1953), Killers from Space (1954; vt Aliens from Space) and ...
Williams, Tad
Working name of US author Robert Paul Williams (1957- ), almost all of whose work has been fantasy, including his first novel, Tailchaser's Song (1985), and whose most influential work is the Memory, Sorrow and Thorn sequence comprising The Dragonbone Chair (1988), Stone of Farewell (1990) and To Green Angel Tower (1993; vt in 2 vols Siege 1994 UK and Storm 1994 UK), which is ...
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 ...