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 ...
Hamilton, Edmond
(1904-1977) US author, married to Leigh Brackett from 1946 until his death. With E E "Doc" Smith and Jack Williamson, he was one of the prime movers in the development of US sf, sharing with those writers in the creation and popularization of classic Space Opera as it first appeared in Pulp magazines from about 1928. His first story, ...
Worlds in Balance
Settings created for sf Games have some unique characteristics not shared with other science-fictional worlds. Most importantly, a gameworld must be balanced, meaning that opposing forces must be of approximately equal capabilities. While this may also be a requirement for an entertaining adventure story, in which the protagonist is engaged in conflict with a reasonable chance of either victory or defeat, games are much more demanding in this regard. Characters in ...
Outer Planets
For a long while, relatively little attention was paid in sf to the planets beyond Jupiter. Of them only Saturn was known to the ancients – Uranus was discovered in 1781, Neptune in 1846 and Pluto in 1930 – and it is therefore the only outer planet featured in Athanasius Kircher's and Emanuel Swedenborg's interplanetary tours. Uranus, however, is included in the anonymous ...
Silbersack, John
(1954- ) US editor, agent and author, active as an editor with Putnam/Berkley books 1977-1981, with New American Library 1986-1992, with Warner Books in 1992, and with Harper Collins 1993-1999; he joined Trident Media Group in 2001 as a senior agent. Throughout his career he has been noted for a swift and canny knowledgeability about the sf world. With Victoria Schochet he edited the first four ...
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 ...