SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Saturday 25 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: Stuart Hopen
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 ...
Weaver, Will
Pseudonym of US teacher and author William Weller (1950- ), most of whose fiction, either for adult or Young Adult readers, is nonfantastic. He is of sf interest for the Memory Boy sequence comprising Memory Boy (2001) and The Survivors (2012), in which a Near Future planetary Disaster – rather domestically described – forces the ...
Salsitz, Rhondi A Vilott
(1949-2024) US author Rhondi Ann Vilott Salsitz, who began to publish work of genre interest with "Persephone" in Orbit 21 (anth 1980) edited by Damon Knight, as Rhondi Vilott. Titles under an abbreviation of her birth name, Rhondi Vilott, and less frequently under her married name, R A V Salsitz, have been restricted to fantasies [see Checklist]; she has also written as by Emily Drake, Elizabeth Forrest, Anne Knight and Jenna Rhodes [again see ...
Symons, Geraldine
(1909-1996) Ceylon-born author, mostly in UK, of some sf interest for Now and Then (1977; vt Crocuses Were Over, Hitler Was Dead 1977), whose young protagonist is visited and visits, via Timeslip, a gardener caught in World War Two. [JC]
Gallion, Jane
(1938-2003) US poet and author, best known for gonzo pornography, the only sf example of which is Biker (1969), a Post-Holocaust tale set in a California dominated by bikers and Drug-cults, and other manifestations of hippy culture gone haywire, in which the repeated acts of rape inflicted on the protagonist are conveyed realistically, and conspicuously without auctorial relish. "Beneath ...
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 ...