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 ...
Crisp, Frank R
(1915-1996) UK author, at one time in the Merchant Navy; his Dirk Rogers sea adventures, which are his best work, sometimes veer close to the fantastic. His sf novels, The Ape of London (1959) and The Night Callers (1960), are routine adventures deploying thriller and horror elements; their sf displacement is inconsiderable. The latter, involving an alien Invasion, was filmed as The ...
Payne, Nick
(1984- ) UK screenwriter and playwright, most of whose dramas pithily compress sometimes transgressive content into stageable form, several of them applying speculative neuroscience to questions of Identity. In some of his work, worlds of discourse hover on the indeterminate boundaries of Fantastika, as in If There Is I Haven't Found It Yet (performed 22 October 2009 Bush Theatre, London; 2013 ...
Smith, Dale
(1976- ) UK author who began publishing work of genre interest with "The Puppet King" in Missing Pieces (anth 2001) edited by Shaun Lyon and Mark Phippen. He has since focused on Tie work for the Doctor Who universe, beginning with Heritage (2002) for the Doctor Who BBC Past Doctors subseries; and for the Time Hunter Shared World sequence ...
Hoyne, Thomas Temple
(1875-1946) US author, a popularizer of Economics topics, and author of Intrigue on the Upper Level: A Story of Crime, Love, Adventure and Revolt in 2050 A.D. (1934), in which a primitive, hierarchical, gangster-run capitalist society is riven by discontent among the lower orders, and is eventually overthrown. [JC]
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 ...