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 ...
Master of Orion
Videogame (1993). Simtex. Designed by Steve Barcia. Platforms: DOS (1993); Mac (1995). / Master of Orion is a turn-based 4X Game, played on a two-dimensional galactic map. Its gameplay is a development of that seen in such earlier games as Reach for the Stars (1983). The central conceit is that a number of species are simultaneously beginning to expand into ...
Roth, Philip
(1933-2018) US author, along with Thomas Pynchon the most influential writer of his generation still active well into the twenty-first century; he is probably still best known for Portnoy's Complaint (1969), a novel whose sophisticated and often comic treatment of the freedoms and imprisonments of Sex is fantastically furthered (see Fabulation) in The Breast (1972), in which a ...
Easton, Edward
Pseudonym of US author Edward P Malerich (1940- ), author of The Miscast Gentleman (1978), a mildly intriguing Time-Travel tale whose protagonist is transported in adventures in Elizabethan England; and The Pirate of Hitchfield (1978), which similarly transports its protagonist into the seventeenth century, where he becomes involved with pirates. [JC]
Wray, A Lunar
Pseudonym of US Unitarian minister and author Minot Judson Savage (1841-1918), whose At the Back of the Moon; Or, Observations of Lunar Phases (1879), a spoofish verse Satire in which a group of touring Lunarians, after conveying to the narrator of the tale their sense of life on the Evolution of life on Earth, return to the back side of the Moon, where they inhabit a topsy-turvy world which 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 ...