SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Monday 20 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 17 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 ...
Who, The
Highly regarded UK rock band, formed in 1964 by guitarist and songwriter Peter Townshend (1945- ), vocalist Roger Daltrey (1944- ), bassist John Entwhistle (1944-2002) and drummer Keith Moon (1946-1978). The Who's blues and rock grounding is evident in a range of skilfully noisy and slyly affecting songs about teenage disaffection, some of the most enduring in the rock-and-roll canon. But Townshend's ambition from an early stage was to write ...
Basile, Gloria Vitanza
(1929-2004) US author, usually of romantic thrillers, whose Global 2000 sequence beginning with Eye of the Eagle (1983) describes a Near Future nuclear World War Three which obliterates the Middle East; earlier volumes provide a convoluted back-story to explain the war, as well as carrying the plot forward, into a time when further conspiracies must be crushed. [JC]
Robbins, Judith Redman
(1941- ) US author of the Coyote Woman trilogy beginning with Coyote Woman (1996), a Prehistoric SF sequence set in the time of the Anasazi civilization and following the life story of a young woman who, instead of marrying as ordained, becomes a force for good in her world (see Feminism; Women in SF) and culture changer. [JC]
Robertson, Morgan
(1861-1915) US sailor and author, almost always on nautical themes; many of his stories are sf or fantasy. These tales, typical of their maritime venues, tend to the mystical, the fog-girt, the occult and the morose, the most useful assemblies of his early work in this vein being Spun Yarn: Sea Stories (coll 1898) and "Where Angels Fear to Tread" and Other Tales of the Sea (coll 1899), both of these assembled with one added story as Spun Yarn: Sea Stories ...
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 ...