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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 24 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 ...
Rothenberg, Alan B
(1907-1977) US psychoanalyst and author of The Mind Reader (1956), a mild sf Satire featuring a Telepath analyst who takes advantage of his power to treat patients. [JC]
Bell, Neil
Preferred pseudonym of UK author Stephen Southwold (1887-1964), born Stephen Henry Critten; he took the name Southwold from his birthplace in Suffolk, because he despised his father, for reasons made clear in the semi-autobiographical chapters which recur in many of his novels; though it has been stated that he changed his name to Bell by deed poll around 1930, this seems not actually to have happened. At least one posthumous volume is copyrighted "Mrs Stephen Southwald". Though he also wrote ...
Paton, John
Pseudonym of UK author Frederick John Alford Bateman (1921-2004), whose unremarkable Space Operas for Robert Hale Limited comprise Leap to the Galactic Core (1978), Proteus (1978) and The Sea of Rings (1979). [JC]
Walker, Alice
(1944- ) US author best known for novels like The Color Purple (1982), exploring from a Feminist perspective the fate of being Black in America. One of the protagonists of The Temple of My Familiar (1989), an extremely long Fabulation, is immortal (see Immortality) or has suffered numerous incarnations (see ...
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 ...