SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Thursday 23 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 ...
Langford, George
(1876-1964) US industrialist, amateur palaeontologist and author of several Prehistoric SF tales for juvenile readers (see Children's SF), beginning with the two Pic the Weapon-Maker tales, Pic the Weapon-Maker (1920) and Kutnar, Son of Pic (1921), set 25,000 years ago and featuring what may be Telepathic rapport with mammoths; ...
Rinzler, J W
(1962-2021) US author and film executive, with Lucasfilm 2001-2016, where he became an executive editor of Lucasbooks; best known for nonfiction books on Cinema and in particular the Star Wars franchise, beginning with Star Wars: The Making of Episode III: Revenge of the Sith (2005) [for further Star Wars volumes see Checklist below]. Other film franchises are discussed in such titles as ...
Creasey, John
(1908-1973) UK author, publisher and literary agent who began writing for the Boys' Papers in 1926, turning to adult thrillers in 1932. He wrote 562 books under (it is widely reported) 28 pseudonyms, but it is doubtful if all were exclusively by him (Michael Moorcock was at one time approached to do writing for him). Like George Griffith with his Future-War ...
Vance, Steve
Working name of US author Steven Edward Vance (1952- ), who has since the late 1980s focused largely on horror novels, though he began writing with some unremarkable but competently conceived sf adventures, including Planet of the Gawfs (1977), a Planetary Romance intended to be comic; All the Shattered Worlds (1980), a Space Opera; and The Hybrid (1981), an ...
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 ...