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
Sponsor of the day: Joe Haldeman
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 ...
Baker, Frank
(1908-1983) UK actor, Television scriptwriter and author whose work is generally and correctly thought of in terms of fantasy and horror, though his second novel, The Birds (1936; rev 1964; rev 2013), is very clearly Equipoisal between Scientific Romance and Supernatural Fiction [see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy ...
Shadowrun
Role Playing Game (1989). FASA. Designed by Bob Charrette, Tom Dowd, Paul Hume. / The setting for Shadowrun is a curious Science and Sorcery fusion of high Fantasy and Cyberpunk, an innovation which greatly appealed to many players but has resulted in adverse comments on its aesthetics from, amongst ...
Fryers, Austin
Pseudonym of Irish trade unionist, playwright and author William Edward Clery (1861-1931), in the UK from 1877, whose activism in his public life cost him more than one job for political reasons. His first novel of interest, The Devil and the Inventor (1900), bridges sf and fantasy (the term Equipoise, here normally used for works whose relationship to the genres they transact is retrospective rather than proleptic, could easily be applied to this ...
Brandner, Gary
(1930-2013) US author, almost all of whose works are either horror tales or thrillers, including several film Ties; he worked under his own name, which has sometimes been given as Gary Barander, and as Nick Carter, Phil Garrison, Clayton Moore and Lee Davis Willoughby. Of his large output, the best known title is The Howling (1977), a Werewolf story which was loosely adapted for the ...
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 ...