SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Sunday 19 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 ...
Barnes, Jonathan
(1979- ) UK author who also writes as J S Barnes; the Somnambulist sequence beginning with The Somnambulist (2007) is a complex detective thriller set in a Steampunk version of Late Victorian London, congenially evoking some of the affirming affect created by Tim Powers in The Anubis Gates (1984) and other tales. The stage magician Edward Moon and ...
Neufeld, John
(1938-2021) US author, mostly for Young Adult readers, beginning with Edgar Allan (1968). He is of sf interest for Sleep, Two, Three, Four! (1971), a highly politicized Near Future Dystopia dominated by "Nixon and Company", and featuring the attempts of a group of teenagers to transcend their conditioning – the model of George ...
Galopin, Arnould
(1863-1934) French author whose nonfantastic novels were critically respected; several were set in World War One, and reflected his war service in the Merchant Marine. Most of his career, however, was focused on popular thrillers, often containing a fantastic element, as in the Doctor Omega sequence beginning with Le Docteur Omega [for subtitle see Checklist below] (1906; adapted Jean-Marc Lofficier ...
El-Mohtar, Amal
(1984- ) Canadian author, poet and editor who first began to publish work of genre interest with "The Crow's Caw" in Shimmer magazine for Summer 2006. She co-edited the online genre Poetry magazine Goblin Fruit (eight issues, 2008-2016), initially with Jessica P Wick and latterly with Caitlin Paxson. The Honey Month (coll 2010 chap) assembles honey-themed tales and verse, including one of her ...
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 ...