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.
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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 ...
Hot Gossip
Also known as "Sarah Brightman and Hot Gossip". A UK dance troupe, choreographed by Arlene Phillips (1943- ), who appeared on a number of 1970s British television shows. Their 1978 hit single "I Lost My Heart to a Starship Trooper", with Sarah Brightman (1960- ) on lead vocals, was released to cash in on the success of Star Wars (1977). It is a catchy though nonsensical piece of space-disco. [AR]
Gibbon, Edwarda
Pseudonym of New Zealand (?) author Charles J Stone (? -? ), whose The History of the Decline and Fall of the British Empire (1884 chap) is a Near Future tale in which a shift in the Gulf Stream causes a savage Climate Change to afflict Britain; eventually, after a century or two, the monarchy moves shop to New Zealand. The tale is told as by a native of that land (see ...
Le Queux, William
(1864-1927) UK journalist and author (his father was French), active contributor to newspapers from the mid-1880s, and author of over 200 books in a variety of genres. Most of his most popular works were espionage thrillers in the vein of E Phillips Oppenheim – a notorious confabulator, Le Queux claimed, unconvincingly, to be a spy himself – and detective novels, often with oriental colouring, beginning with Guilty Bonds (1890), ...
Geen, Eric
(? - ) UK author of an sf Satire, Tolstoy Lives at 12N B9 (1971), published at a time when in the UK residents in garden suburbs and meticulously designed exurbs were beginning to live through the downside of the knowing solicitude of the town-planners who thought the destruction wreaked by World War Two was an opportunity. Tolstoy is a boy; his residential address fixes him into a ...
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 ...