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 20 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 ...
Bosse, Malcolm
(1926-2002) US author of novels for adult and Young Adult readerships, best known for The Warlord (1983) which, like most of his work, is an historical fiction. Of genre interest are Cave Beyond Time (1980), whose orphaned, 15-year-old protagonist Time Travels from an Arizona archaeological dig to three different ancient eras, where he undergoes rites of passage into acceptance of his maturing self; and ...
Irvanets, Oleksandr
(1961- ) Ukrainian author, poet, and translator, of genre interest for his dystopia Rivni/Rovno (2002), which imagined his hometown split by a Political border inspired by his experience of visiting Berlin during the Cold War. / Framed in part as a tourist guide to the twinned cities (compare to similar Fabulation in the works of ...
Yellow Peril
The popular Term, not only within sf circles, for military or economic expansionism by China and other Far Eastern nations (see Invasion; Politics) as seen through the distorting lens of Western Paranoia, and understandable in those terms as central to the language and fears expressed in Imperial Gothic in the years before ...
Atkins, Juan
(1962- ) US electronic musician and composer. Inspired by Kraftwerk, Afrika Bambaataa, Yellow Magic Orchestra and Parliament, Atkins began experimenting with synthesizers and tape-decks in the early 1980s, making a name for himself as a pioneer of techno and hip-hop. He has recorded under a variety of names. As "Cybotron" he had hits ...
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 ...