SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Wednesday 22 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
Sponsor of the day: Conversation 2023
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 ...
Went the Day Well?
Film (1942). Ealing Studios. Directed by Alberto Cavalcanti. Written by John Dighton, Angus MacPhail and Diana Morgan from a Graham Greene story, "The Lieutenant Died Last" (29 June 1940 Collier's Weekly). Cast includes Leslie Banks, Muriel George, Thora Hird, Mervyn Johns, Basil Sydney, Valerie Taylor. 92 minutes. Black and white. / This effective World War Two film is narrated ...
Tanner, Mack
(1937- ) US author perhaps best known for his nonfiction advocacy of an armed America, Armed-Citizen Solution to Crime in the Streets: So Many Criminals, So Few Bullets (1995). In his Target series of thrillers, Target: Intruder (1990) features an ancient deepsea Monster and its assault on American warships. [JC]
Filk
One of the more enduring coinages of Fan Language, this is the short form of "filksong", which in turn originated from the obvious typo in an early-1950s Fanzine article, "The Influence of Science Fiction on Modern American Filk Music" by Lee Jacobs (intended for the APA SAPS, the Spectator Amateur Press Society, but not actually published there owing to bawdy content). The first ...
Bolaño, Roberto
Working name of Chilean journalist, poet and author Roberto Bolaño Avalos (1953-2003), who was garlanded with awards for works largely outside the sf genre (see Mainstream Writers of SF). Most of his short fiction skirts the fantastic, though his Beast Fable, "El policia de las ratas" (in El gaucho insufrible, coll 2003; trans Chris Andrews as "Police Rat" in The Insufferable Gaucho 2010), ...
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 ...