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.
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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 ...
Stoughton, Richard P
(? - ) US author whose sf novel, Ultima One (1980), depicts a Disaster in space that affects Earth; there is some sense that Homo sapiens has been morally culpable. [JC]
Erickson, Paul
(1920-1991) Welsh scriptwriter, active from the 1950s, and author of a Doctor Who Tie, Doctor Who: The Ark (1986), based on his own script – also co-credited on broadcast to his then wife, Lesley Scott – for the 1966 television version of the tale, which involves complex relationships among various Alien races on a vast spaceship. [JC]
Charrette, Robert N
(1953- ) US author and Game designer, often as Bob Charrette. He co-designed the sf Role Playing Games Aftermath (1981) – with a Post-Holocaust setting – and Shadowrun (1989). His fiction consists mostly of sf and fantasy Ties, including game novelizations for the ...
Pynchon, Thomas
(1937- ) US author who began to publish work of genre interest with "Mortality and Mercy in Vienna" in Epoch Magazine for Spring 1959; all of his works are Fabulations in that most of them resemble sf under some interpretations (see also Fantastika), and Against the Day (2006) is undoubtedly sf. Though the Paranoia-wracked worlds his protagonists inhabit may ...
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 ...