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.
Site updated on 24 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 ...
They Came from Beyond Space
Film (1967). Amicus Productions UK/Embassy Pictures Corporation US. Produced by Max Rosenberg and Milton Subotsky. Directed by Freddie Francis. Written by Subotsky based on The Gods Hate Kansas (November 1941 Startling; rev 1964) by Joseph Millard. Special effects by Les Bowie (uncredited). Cast includes Michael Gough, Robert Hutton, Jennifer Jayne, Bernard Kay and Zia Mohyeddin. 85 minutes. Colour. ...
Kneen, Krissy
(1968- ) Australian bookseller, film and television director, screenwriter and author. In An Uncertain Grace (2017) a young woman intensely focused on recreating the night she lost her virginity (see Sex) invents a Virtual Reality immersion device. Her seducer, a teacher who had made questionable use of the power of his position, is forced to wear this suit, and to come to a better understanding of ...
Wright, Allen Kendrick
(1861-1948) US minister and author whose To the Poles by Airship; Or, Around the World Endways (1909) confusedly but intriguingly surrounds the narrative of a round-the-world trip, in an Airship powered by liquid air (see Power Sources), with a series of speculations and visions: a Lost Race inhabiting Atlantis is glimpsed; a ...
Preston, H
Pseudonym used for fiction by US technical author Henry Preston Nail (1931-2012), author of Project Deep Space (2000), set in the moderately distant Near Future as private corporations finally provide the impetus to launch Homo sapiens into interstellar space; the Invention of successively more efficient Spaceship drives is focused upon. [JC]
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 ...