SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Monday 20 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.
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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 ...
Rice, Jeff
Working name of US author Jeffrey Grant Rice (1944-2015), best known for his novel The Night Stalker (written 1970; 1973), which before publication was adapted by Richard Matheson as the made-for-television film The Night Stalker (1972). The protagonist of both book and film is newspaper reporter Carl Kolchak, whose investigation of a serial killer leads to a Vampire culprit. The next, very ...
Hovenden, Robert
UK author, most probably Robert Meyrick Hovenden (circa 1809-1885), who published various books 1844-1876. Of sf interest is an unfictionalized Future History, A Tract of Future Times [for subtitle see Checklist] (1851), told as though written after 1950 and giving an accounting of the previous era, concentrating on the last fifty years of the nineteenth century, espousing a kind of benevolently anarchic ...
Lawrence, Edmund
(? -? ) UK author of It May Happen Yet: A Tale of Bonaparte's Invasion of England (1899), a self-published but frequently noted work of what may be an early Alternate History or – as Darko Suvin argues in Victorian Science Fiction in the UK: The Discourses of Knowledge and Power (dated 1983 but 1984) – an example of "forgotten history", as Napoleon's ...
Chobits
Japanese animated tv series (2002). Madhouse. Based on the Manga by CLAMP. Directed by Morio Asaka. Writers include Jukki Hanada, Genjiro Kaneko and Sumio Uetake. Voice cast includes Isshin Chiba, Kikuko Inoue, Tomokazu Sugita and Rie Tanaka. 26 25-minute episodes, plus two OVAs. Colour. / When country boy Hideki Motosuwa (Sugita) moves to Tokyo to attend Prep School, he sees his first persocoms – ...
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 ...