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 ...
Columbia Workshop
Radio series (1936-1943; 1946-1947). CBS Radio for CBS Radio Network. Producers included Nila Mack and William N Robson. Directors included Irving Reis (1906-1953), Earle MacGill, Robson, Myron Sattler (?1907-?1981), Nila Mack, others. Staff writers included Stephen Vincent Benét, Richard Hughes, Vic Knight, Reis and Robson. Several hundred 60-minute episodes were produced, some as two-part serials. At ...
McGill, Robert
(1976- ) Canadian author, active from around 2000. He is of sf interest for his third novel, A Suitable Companion for the End of Your Life (2022), set in a Near Future world in which the only cure for an ongoing Pandemic is a process known as flatpacking. A diseased person's body is dehydrated, filled with a poison fluid claimed to be restorative, and the resulting flattened package sent from ...
Space Elevator
An increasingly popular item of sf Transportation hardware since its introduction to the genre by the near-simultaneous appearance of Arthur C Clarke's The Fountains of Paradise (1979) and Charles Sheffield's The Web Between the Worlds (1979; exp 1989). The space elevator's basic concept is simply that of a tethered "skyhook" cable – fixed at ...
Lichtenberg, Jacqueline
(1942- ) US author who began publishing sf with "Operation High Time" for If in January 1969, but soon concentrated on fan fiction set in the Open Universe permitted by the owners of Star Trek; Star Trek Lives! (1975) with Sondra Marshak and Joan Winston is a famous nonfiction description of the early days of Star Trek fandom. Her ...
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 ...