SF Encyclopedia Home Page
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 20 January 2025
Sponsor of the day: Joe Haldeman
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 ...
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, The [game]
Videogame (1984). Infocom. Designed by Douglas Adams, Steve Meretzky. Platforms: AppleII, Atari8, C64, DOS, Mac (1984); AtariST (1985); Amiga, Amstrad (1986). / Hitchhiker is a text-based Adventure game, a variation on the theme established in the ...
Zathura: A Space Adventure
Film (2005). Columbia Pictures presents a Radar Pictures/Teitler Film/Michael de Luca production. Directed by Jon Favreau. Written by David Koepp & John Camps, based on Zathura: A Space Adventure (graph 2002) by Chris van Allsburg. Cast includes Jonah Bobo, Josh Hutcherson, Tim Robbins, Dax Shepard and Kristen Stewart. 119 minutes. Colour. / Two squabbling brothers discover a vintage mechanical ...
Shaw, W J
(? -? ) US author of a Hollow Earth tale, Under the Auroras: A Marvellous Tale of the Interior World by an American Author, Playwright, and Journalist (1888; vt Cresten, Queen of the Toitus; Or, Under the Auroras 1892 as W J Shaw). Within the double narrative frame – the real protagonist, Amos Jackson, tells an unnamed interlocutor the story of his adventures – a Symmesian inner world ...
Dig, The
Videogame (1995). LucasArts. Designed by Sean Clark, Brian Moriarty. Platforms: DOS (1995); Mac (1996); Win (2002). / The Dig is a graphical Adventure game using a point and click interface, based on an idea by Steven Spielberg which combined the haunted world of Forbidden Planet with the tense relationships of ...
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 ...