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.
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 ...
Swift, Jonathan
(1667-1745) Irish satirist, cleric and poet, dean of St Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin, from 1713, who began publishing with the relatively innocuous Ode: to the King on his Irish Expedition (1691 chap), but who soon composed A Tale of a Tub [for subtitle see Checklist] (1704) anonymous, written almost a decade before it was published. The book incorporated a second Satire, usually called today "The Battle of the Books", which used the imagery ...
Ash Ra Tempel
German space rock band formed in 1971 by Manuel Göttsching (1952- ) and Klaus Schulze, although Schulze's presence in the group has been intermittent. The group's eponymous first release Ash Ra Tempel (1971) is a classic of "krautrock": lengthy and mostly improvisatory rock with loosely astral themes and titles – the band's name positions their work in hierophantic relation to the ...
Dalton, Moray
Pseudonym of UK author Katharine Renoir (1881-1963). Of her 30 or so adventure thrillers, one is clearly sf: in The Black Death (1934), after a devastating Disaster, a group of men and women awake into a Ruined Earth dominated by a world state. She is not to be confused with Arthur Laxton Haynes (1883-? ), who wrote a book of verse [title not known] in 1915 as Moray Dalton. [SH/JC]
Khan
Short-lived UK band, named after the Star Trek villain. Its sole release was Space Shanty (1972), a suite of prog-rock songs embroidering a loose futuristic spacefaring concept, especially in the tracks "Space Shanty", "Stargazers" and "Hollow Stone (incl. Escape of the Space Pilots)". The music is characteristic prog: grandiose and ornate, alternating meditative moments with harder rock-orchestral thumpings. [AR]
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 ...