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
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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 ...
Nichols, Beverley
(1898-1983) UK author, perhaps best known for a series of nonfiction books about gardens and gardening. Of his fifty or so books, one of the most interesting is the ghostwritten autobiography – Melodies and Memories (1925) – of the most famous prima donna of the day, Nellie Melba, whom he had accompanied on tour for several years. He is of direct sf interest for a Near Future Dystopian "When the Crash ...
Gaiman, Neil
(1960- ) UK journalist, screenwriter and author, in the US from 1992, whose first publications were nonfiction; along with later essays, some of this earlier work has been assembled as The View from the Cheap Seats: Selected Nonfiction (coll 2016). He then specialized in the scripting of fantasy and sf comics and Graphic Novels for a decade from the late 1980s onward, and more recently focused on novels of the fantastic ...
Wonder Stories Quarterly
US letter-size Pulp magazine, Fall 1929 to Summer 1932, dropped to standard pulp-size Fall 1932 to Winter 1933, 14 issues, published by Hugo Gernsback's Stellar Publishing Corporation as a quarterly companion to Science Wonder Stories/Wonder Stories, the first three issues appearing as Science Wonder Quarterly. David Lasser was the managing editor. Wonder Stories Quarterly ...
Spain
Mostly influenced by Jules Verne and Camille Flammarion, Spanish nineteenth-century Proto SF featured four voyage-to-the-Moon tales, beginning with the anonymous didactic utopia Viage de un filósofo a Selenópolis ["Selenopolis"] (1804); Joaquín Castillo y Mayone's oneiric story Zulema y Lambert ["Zulema and Lambert"] ...
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 ...