SF Encyclopedia Home Page
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 ...
Roberts, Ralph
(1945-2021) US author and publisher who began to publish work of genre interest with "A Sailor's Delight" in Asimov's for May 1980; his short fiction appeared in various magazines and anthologies to 2018. His one novel is The Hundred-Acre Spaceship (2002), a comedy that spoofs Cold War tensions and antipathies. The Invention by a young genius of "disruptor field technology", a ...
Bhatia, Gautam
(1988- ) Indian lawyer, essayist and author, resident in the UK; author of studies in Indian jurisprudence including Offend, Shock, or Disturb: Freedom of Speech Under the Indian Constitution (2015). He is of direct sf interest for the Chronicles of Sumer sequence beginning with The Wall (2020), set in an Earth-like venue at some indeterminate time in what could be the Far Future, where a vast circular ...
Retro-Pulp
A term which recognizes the renewed interest in Pulp fiction magazines and characters long after the pulp era had finished. To some extent one might argue that this began even before the end of the pulps. The last sf pulp magazine, Science Fiction Quarterly appeared at the end of 1957 (issue dated February 1958), and it had been clear for the last three or four years that the pulps were a dying breed, being superseded by ...
Hossain, Rokeya Sakhawat
(1880-1932) Bengali activist, educator and author, born Roquia Khatun; her surname is also given as Hussain, and she was also known (and published) as Begama Rokeẏā, Rokeya Begum and Begum Rokeya Sakhaoyat Hossain. It has been suggested that she may have been born in 1877. She was fluent in several languages, but from the beginning of her career in 1902 wrote mostly in Bengali; her influential advocacy of education for women, and for women's rights in ...
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 ...