SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Sunday 19 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 17 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 ...
DeChancie, John
(1946- ) US author who worked in television in various capacities before beginning to publish sf with his Skyway Trilogy comprising Starrigger (1983), Red Limit Freeway (1984) and Paradox Alley (1986). Based on a truckers-in-space premise with some comic potential, the already crowded tale is complicated by Time Paradoxes, godlings and much more, all built around the search for a missing ...
Johansen, Dag Ove
(1950- ) Norwegian author, editor and publisher with approximately 100 short sf stories in Magazines, Anthologies, newspapers and Fanzines. Ten of his 30 books are sf. Johansen became interested in sf at an early age, encouraged by his teachers to write essays such as "What do you think the future will be like?" At 18 he founded a local sf club and launched ...
Cold Equations, The
Made-for-tv film (1996). USA Pictures/Alliance Communications Corporation/Chanticleer Films. Produced by Yoram Barzilai and Jana Sue Memel. Directed by Peter Geiger. Written by Stephen Berger, Geiger and Norman Plotkin, based on "The Cold Equations" (August 1954 Astounding) by Tom Godwin. Cast includes Billy Campbell (as Bill Campbell), Poppy Montgomery and William R Moses. 92 minutes. Colour. / Sometime in the future, ...
Ludgate Monthly, The
UK general-interest magazine which ran for 118 issues from May 1891 to February 1901 when it merged with The Universal Magazine. It went through a succession of publishers and editors, none of whom seemed to know what to do with it, though it was at its best when it became a companion to Black and White from November 1895 to March 1898 and was edited by James Nicol Dunn and then Henry D Lowry. Its first editor was Philip May, not the same as the noted artist and cartoonist Phil ...
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 ...