SF Encyclopedia Home Page
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
Sponsor of the day: Joe Haldeman
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 ...
Graham, David
Pseudonym of UK author Evan Wright (1919-1994), who is of moderate sf interest for two sf novels for Robert Hale Limited: Down to a Sunless Sea (1979), a genuinely grim Holocaust novel, featuring a few survivors of a devastating nuclear war as they fail to find safe haven; Sidewall (1982) is more routine. [JC]
Huberman, Carl
Pseudonym of an unidentified UK author (? - ) of Near Future tales with a Technothriller atmosphere. These include Eminent Domain (1996), about an assassin who (though himself legally dead) is able to use Sex to kill his victims; Welcome to the 51st State (1999), very thriller-like in its telling of the story of an ...
Sherwood, Martin
(1942-2011) UK author with a PhD in organic chemistry; editor of Chemistry & Industry. His sf novels are Survival (1975) and Maxwell's Demon (1976); in the latter, Aliens invade humans, thus putting them to sleep. [JC]
Waugh, Sylvia
(1935-2022), UK teacher, librarian, careers adviser and author whose first book was the children's fantasy The Mennyms (1993), about a miniature Wainscot Society comprising a single family living quasi-secretly in a house in the suburbs of some north-England town or City: the well-delineated family members are not human but magically animated life-size rag dolls, whose quiet existence is here seemingly endangered ...
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 ...