SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Sunday 26 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 ...
O'Brien, Robert C
Pseudonym of US author Robert Leslie Conly (1918-1973); his books were marketed as juveniles, though the last two are essentially adult. His first, The Silver Crown (1968; rev 1973) [see Checklist below], is a sometimes frightening, complex fantasy about the kidnapping of a young girl by a king who in turn is ruled by a malignant Machine. Mrs Frisby and the Rats of NIMH (1971; vt The Secret of NIMH 1982), which won ...
Dain, Alex
Pseudonym of US therapist and author Alex Lukeman (1941- ), who has published under his own name several books on the nature of dreams and the ongoing thriller series The Project, which relates the exploits of the eponymous secret US counter-terrorism unit, beginning with White Jade (2011). Lukeman used the Alex Dain byline for his first novel only: The Bane of Kanthos (1969 dos), which is ...
Lombard, Louis
(1861-1927) French-born composer, financier and author, in the US for long periods after 1876, where he became Director of the Utica Conservatory of Music; his Lost Race tale, The Vicious Virtuoso (1898), describes an advanced superscientific race in pre-pharaonic Egypt, a Utopia eventually destroyed by Religion. [JC]
Russell, John [2]
(1792-1878) UK politician and author, Prime-Minister of Great Britain 1846-1852, and 1865-1866, grandfather of Bertrand Russell; from his early writing career, the title novella assembled in Adventures in the Moon and Other Worlds (coll 1836) features a trip by mechanical Spaceship to the Moon, where a mélange of figures from various narrative traditions can be found, including ...
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 ...