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.
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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 ...
Where Have All the People Gone?
Made-for-tv film (1974). Metromedia/NBC. Directed by John L Moxey. Teleplay Lewis John Carlino, Sandor Stern, from a story by Carlino. Cast includes Verna Bloom, Peter Graves, George O'Hanlon Jr and Ken Sanson. 72 minutes. Colour. / A man and his teenage children are in a cave when a solar flare creates a virus (!) which kills, then reduces to something like sand, almost everybody on Earth. Following this global Disaster the family journeys across ...
Baber, Asa
(1936-2003) US author, best-known for a column he wrote for Playboy from 1982 until his death of Lou Gehrig's Disease, which he described openly; his column, though rebarbative in some of its defensiveness about Men, argued cogently for male parental rights when parents are separated. A rogue General threatens a Near Future nuclear conflict in South East Asia in his first novel, The Land of a Million Elephants (February-April ...
Engdahl, Sylvia Louise
(1933- ) US author, employed in the field of computer programming 1957-1967. Her novels, though marketed as juveniles, appeal as well to adults for their intelligence and humanity. The Elena sequence – comprising Enchantress from the Stars (1970) and The Far Side of Evil (1971) – is perhaps her best-known work. The first describes, with suggestive analogues between traditional and technological versions of crucial events (to ...
FAAn Awards
Short, partly acronymic name for the Fan (or Fanzine) Activity Achievement Awards first presented in 1975 for 1974 activity in Fandom, principally in Fanzines, and chosen by popular vote, initially with a small voting fee. The original categories were for best single issue of a fanzine, best fan writer, best fan editor, best fan artist – subdivided into serious and humorous categories – and best LoC ...
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 ...