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
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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 ...
Raphael, Rick
(1919-1994) US author and journalist who began publishing sf with "A Filbert is a Nut" for Astounding in November 1959 and established a considerable reputation in the field with a comparatively small output of about ten stories, most of them assembled in The Thirst Quenchers (coll 1965) and Code Three (fixup 1966). The first contains four good stories, the best of which is the title story about professionals in a future where Earth's water ...
Fahrenheit 451 [game]
Videogame (1984). Telarium. Designed by Len Neufeld. Platforms: AppleII, C64, DOS (1984); Mac (1985); AtariST, MSX (1986). / Fahrenheit 451 is an illustrated text Adventure which serves as a sequel to Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 (February 1951 Galaxy as "The Fireman"; exp 1953), and to which Bradbury made significant ...
Davidson, John
(1857-1909) Scottish schoolteacher, poet, playwright and author, best known in the first capacity for his Fleet Street Eclogues (coll 1893 chap); though not specifically fantastic, his intensely urban poetry, much of which focuses on science and technology from an almost mystical point of view, had a shaping influence now forgotten. Some tales, like Perfervid: The Career of Ninian Jamieson (1890), contain unfocused elements of the fantastic, partly through spoof ...
Canty, Thomas
(1952- ) US illustrator known for his pale, delicate style, for the Art Nouveau-inspired, ethereal women he often paints, and for his use of stylized costume details. His approach has been famously described by Terri Windling as "New Romanticism", said to contrast with the "Heroic" style associated with artists like Frank Frazetta. Canty's fame is out of proportion to the amount of work (mostly book ...
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 ...