SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Wednesday 22 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 ...
Weller, Archie
(1957- ) Australian author whose second novel, Land of the Golden Clouds (1998), is set in a Ruined Earth Australia three millennia hence, long after a destructive nuclear World War Three; it is built around its varied protagonists' epic journey across the great continent, undergoing experiences typical of the Fantastic Voyage, before they redeem ...
Braid
Term used to designate a Shared-World anthology or book-length tale whose individual parts, written by different hands, are edited – generally by the proprietor/editor of the shared world – so that their beginnings and ends weave (or braid) into one another, and the whole tells a unified story. When done properly, braids (also known as braided stories) can generate a chronicle-like sense in the reader – an effect attained also by successful ...
Barclay, Linwood
(1955- ) US-born journalist and author, in Canada from the age of four; active from the late 1970s. Most of his work has been nonfantastic, including the Zack Walker thriller sequence beginning with Bad Move (2004) and No Time for Goodbye (2007), the singleton for which he remains best-known [these titles are not listed below]. His first work of sf interest is the Young Adult Chase sequence opening ...
Acker, Kathy
(1947-1997) US playwright and author born Karen Alexander, who may never have met her biological father Harry Lehman Jr; she went as Kathy from early childhood, and took the surname of her first husband, Robert Acker, on ther marriage in 1966. She lived in the UK off and on for many years. Acker's apocalyptic sense of the latter-day world is conveyed in works whose tortured absurdity (see Fabulation) sometimes catches the reader by surprise, or transfixes the ...
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 ...