SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Saturday 25 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 ...
Woltor, Robert
(? -? ) US author of a Yellow Peril tale, A Short and Truthful History of the Taking of California and Oregon by the Chinese in the Year AD 1899 (1882), constructed in the form of a Future History which recounts the Chinese naval Invasion of San Francisco (see California); by 1899, China, aided by immigrant Fifth ...
Satō Haruo
(1892-1964) Japanese author and poet, very much part of the mainstream literary establishment, remembered in sf terms for an early experiment in Dystopia and fantasies that prefigured those of dedicated genre authors such as Jūza Unno. Satō was only sixteen when his first work was published, a poem in the literary magazine Myōjō. He soon attained celebrity as a poet and occasional ...
Embryo
Film (1976). Cine Artists. Directed by Ralph Nelson. Written by Anita Doohan, Jack W Thomas, based on a story by Thomas. Cast includes Barbara Carrera, Rock Hudson, Diane Ladd and Roddy McDowall. 105 minutes. Colour. / In this variation on the Frankenstein theme, an overreaching Scientist (Hudson), while experimenting on a premature foetus with a growth hormone, creates in weeks a fully developed 25-year-old woman ...
Sweeney-Baird, Christina
(1993- ) UK lawyer and author whose first novel, The End of Men (2021), is set in Near Future Britain devastated by a savage Pandemic which has proved fatal to almost all males, a familiar topos examined previously in such works as Brian W Aldiss's Greybeard (1964), P D James's The Children of Men (1992) ...
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 ...