SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Sunday 19 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 17 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 ...
Aguirre, Forrest
(1969- ) US editor and author who has been associated with Jeff VanderMeer in the Leviathan anthologies of fantastic literature, specifically co-editing Leviathan 3 (anth 2002) and editing solo Leviathan 4 (anth 2004). His first fiction of genre interest was "The Nut Lady's Cabin" for The Earwig Flesh Factory in 2000; and his work, mostly ornately argued Fabulation ...
O'Neill, Henry J
(1859-1926) Welsh-born lawyer and author, in the US from 1869; his sf novel, The Travels of John Wryland [for full title see Checklist] (1903), is a Fantastic Voyage tale centring on a Lost Race in Tibet, an authoritarian Dystopia viewed with disfavour by Wryland. [JC]
Cowboys & Aliens
Film (2011). Dreamworks Pictures, Universal Pictures, and Reliance Entertainment in association with Relativity Media present an Imagine Entertainment/KO Paper Products/Fairview Entertainment/Platinum Studios production. Directed by Jon Favreau. Written by Roberto Orci & Alex Kurtzman & Damon Lindelof and Mark Fergus & Hawk Ostby; story by Fergus & Ostby and Steve Oedekerk, based on Cowboys and Aliens (graph 2006) by Scott ...
Tarnacre, Robert
Pseudonym of UK author Robert Cartmell (1877-? ) in whose Lost Race tale, Beyond the Swamps (1929), a British patrol boat explores an unknown backwater, upstream from which an intact ancient Roman civilization discovered, and is soon brought to heel under the civilizing influence of Empire discipline. [JC]
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 ...