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Friday 17 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 17 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 ...
Two Lost Worlds
Film (1951). Sterling Productions, Inc. Produced by Boris Petroff. Directed by Norman Dawn. Dinosaur stock footage by Roy Seawright from One Million B.C. (1940). Written by Tom Hubbard from a story by Phyllis Parker and Boris Petroff (uncredited). Cast includes James Arness (credited as James Aurness), Bill Kennedy, Gloria Petroff, Kasey Rogers (credited as Laura Elliott) and Michael Rye (credited as Rye Billsbury). Narrator: Dan Riss. 61 ...
Supergirl
Film (1984). Artistry/Cantharus. Directed by Jeannot Szwarc. Written by David Odell, based on the Supergirl comic. Cast includes Peter Cook, Faye Dunaway, Peter O'Toole, Helen Slater and Brenda Vaccaro. 124 minutes. Colour. / This is the last and least successful of the four Superman-and-spin-off films made by the Salkinds before they sold the rights to Golan and Globus of Cannon Films, who went on to make ...
Lockhart-Mummery, J P
(1875-1957) UK surgeon and author of After Us; Or, the World as It Might Be (1936), an essentially nonfictional exercise in Futures Studies, but containing an embedded set of (necessarily fictional) letters written home by a New Zealander, describing the state of affairs in the UK in the twenty-fifth century. [JC]
Davenport, Benjamin Rush
(? -? ) US author, quite possibly a resident of Cleveland, Ohio, whose "Uncle Sam's" Cabins: A Story of American Life, Looking Forward a Century (1895) initially depicts a Near Future so biased toward capitalists that most Americans have become serfs; a Pandemic (see also Disaster) eventually gives a reformer the chance to create a more equitable ...
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 ...