SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Saturday 18 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 ...
Dracula vs Frankenstein
Film (1971; vt Blood Freaks). Independent International Pictures. Produced and directed by Al Adamson. Written by William Pugsley and Samuel M Sherman. Cast includes John Bloom, Regina Carrol, Lon Chaney, Anthony Eisley, J Carrol Nash and Zandar Vorkov. 90 minutes. Colour. / Dr Duryea (Nash) is actually Dr Frankenstein, who has set up shop at a sleazy sideshow carnival near Venice, California, and continues his experiments in a hidden basement ...
Williams, Neil Wynn
(1864-1940) UK author, whose two volumes of his versions of Greek folklore, Tales and Sketches of Modern Greece (coll 1894) and the Bayonet That Came Before: A Vanity of Modern Greece (coll 1896), are of very modest interest. In his sf novel, The Electric Theft (1906), highly organized anarchists are abstracting huge amounts of electricity from a great plant in Athens but, more seriously, the mastermind and Villain Stavinsky ...
Langdon-Davies, John
(1897-1971) South African-born poet and author, mostly in the UK from the age of six, a pacifist in World War One, and much involved in Spain and its conflicts during the interWar years; he is of some sf interest for A Short History of the Future (1936), which – like J D Bernal's The World, the Flesh and the Devil (1929 chap) – is essentially an exercise in Futures Studies ...
Hoffmeister, Pedro
Working name of US athlete, poet and author Peter Brown Hoffmeister (? - ), whose books under his unaltered name are nonfantastic; he is of sf interest for the Young Adult American Afterlife (2022), set in a Near Future Pacific Rim of America soon after the Disaster in this vulnerable region of an enormous earthquake whose magnitude (9.2 on the ...
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 ...