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 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 ...
Falls, The
Film (1980). British Film Institute. Directed by Peter Greenaway. Written by Greenaway. 187 minutes. Colour. / Perhaps the most elliptical Disaster in sf Cinema, the Violent Unknown Event (VUE) has killed an unspecified number of people and afflicted 19 million others with bizarre symptoms including physical mutation (see Mutants), recurring dreams of water, sexual quadromorphism, the spontaneous ...
Zerwick, Chloe
(1923-2018) US editor, artist and author who collaborated with Harrison Brown on The Cassiopeia Affair (1968), in which a message from an Alien civilization – possibly faked – has a potentially transformative effect upon a world at the brink of World War Three. As an artist she worked mostly in glass, her second book, which is nonfiction, being ...
Gillespie, Bruce
(1947- ) Australian educational-books and Fanzine editor, critic, essayist and Small Press publisher. Bruce Gillespie entered Fandom in late 1967 after sending Australian SF Review three essays about the works of Philip K Dick. Though not published until ...
Mailer, Norman
(1923-2007) US public figure, controversialist and author at the centre of American intellectual life for many decades after the publication of his first novel, The Naked and the Dead (1948), though his influence waned in his last years. Mailer's work was never identified with genre fiction, but all of his later fiction contain elements of Fantasy, with frequent evocations of an imaginative world containing spirits, paranormal phenomena and magical ...
Robinson, Roger
(1943- ) UK computer programmer, bibliographer and publisher, active in UK Fandom for many years. The Writings of Henry Kenneth Bulmer (1983 chap; rev 1984 chap) is an exhaustive Bibliography of one of the most prolific sf writers, Kenneth Bulmer, and Who's Hugh?: An SF Reader's Guide to Pseudonyms (1987) is similarly exhaustive in its ...