SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 21 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 ...
Black, Ladbroke
(1877-1940) UK author of much boys' fiction, often as Lionel Day or Paul Urquhart, and thrillers, including some Sexton Blake Library novels, including The Strange Affair of the Rejuvenation Club (1928 chap) as Anonymous, in which the sf element turns out to be a criminous hoax; he also wrote occasionally as Ladbroke Lionel Day Black. He had begun publishing as early as 1902, though he put nothing of sf interest into book form until ...
D'Armen, Guy
Apparently the chief pseudonym of an unidentified French author (? -? ), active between 1899 and 1939 under this name as well as Francis Annemary, Jacques Diamant, Corentin Goulphar and perhaps others. He specialized in exorbitant tales of adventure, featuring figures at the edge of gaining Superhero status, the most important of these being Doctor Ardan in the Doc Ardan sequence beginning with "La Cite de L'Or et de la ...
White, Stewart Edward
(1873-1946) US author of travel books and novels, many of the latter being historical tales set in California. In his later years he became interested in Spiritualism, believed he was in contact with his dead wife, and wrote some books about the other world, including The Unobstructed Universe (1940) and two sequels. Of sf interest is the Percy Darrow sequence. The Mystery (1907) with Samuel Hopkins Adams is a ...
Jensen, Johannes V
(1873-1950) Danish poet, author and essayist, author of detective novels as by Ivar Lykke; awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1944. He is best known for Den Lange Rejse [for individual titles see Checklist] (1908-1922 6vols; trans Arthur G Chater, vols 1-2 as The Long Journey: Fire and Ice 1922 UK, vols 3-4 as The Cimbrians: The Long Journey II 1923 UK, and vols 5-6 as ...
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 ...