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 20 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 ...
Gunther, John
(1901-1970) US author, best known for the memoir of the death of his child, Death, Be Not Proud (1948). Of some sf interest are Eden for One: An Amusement (1927; vt Peter Lancelot: An Amusement 1927), in which a mage from another Dimension gives young Peter the opportunity to create an Alternate World to thrive in, which he takes; and The Bright Nemesis (1932), a ...
Mathematics
The imaginations of pure mathematicians have provided sf writers with important motifs. For example, the notions taken from geometry and topology of a fourth and other Dimensions (which see for a listing of relevant sf stories) have the essential qualities of strangeness and mystery, making them an enjoyable struggle for the untrained intuition to accept. A surprising number of sf writers have been mathematicians, or at least have trained in mathematics; among ...
Lost Horizon
1. Film (1937). Columbia. Directed by Frank Capra. Written by Robert Riskin, based on Lost Horizon (1933) by James Hilton. Cast includes Ronald Colman, Edward Everett Horton, Sam Jaffe, Thomas Mitchell, H B Warner and Jane Wyatt. 133 minutes, cut to 118 minutes, then to 109 minutes; but 128 minute print (some lost footage being represented by stills) available from 2000. Black and white. / In this memorably sentimental, deft, ...
Woops!
Tv series (1996). Witt/Thomas Productions with Touchstone Television for Fox Network. Created by Gary Jacobs. Produced by Drew Brown and Gil Junger. Directed by Terry Hughes. Writers include Ross Abrash, Harold Kimmel and Mark Nutter. Cast includes Fred Applegate, Lane Davies, Cleavant Derricks, Meagen Fay, Marita Geraghty, Evan Handler. 13 25-minute episodes. Colour. / Children playing with a remote-controlled toy car somehow cause the accidental launch of a nuclear missile which ...
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 ...