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.
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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 ...
Willis, Meredith Sue
(1946- ) US author active since the early 1990s, much of her work being nonfiction about the art of writing. Of some sf interest is the Young Adult tale The City Built of Starships (2005), whose young Ecologically-sound protagonist confronts old-guard remnants of the expedition which has attempted to colonize (see Colonization of Other Worlds) the ...
Jay, Victor
Pseudonym of Victor J Banis (1937-2019), who is perhaps best known for transgressive 1960s novels like The Affairs of Gloria (1964), which was unsuccessfully prosecuted for obscenity by officials in Sioux City, Iowa, and for The Man from C.A.M.P. sequence of gay detective novels. Early pseudonyms include Jay Vickery, under which he wrote one sf novel, Man Into Boy (1968), and the House Name J X ...
Miller, Steve
(1950-2024) US author who began publishing work of genre interest with "Shalgiel" for Flux Magazine in 1976, one of his few solo works, as he soon began collaborating with Sharon Lee with "The Naming of Kinzel: The Foolish" (June 1984 Fantasy Book); all his novels have been with Lee, primarily the Liaden Universe sequence of Space Opera tales, set in expansive (though not adventurously ...
Owen, Walter
(1884-1953) Scottish translator, poet and author; rejected despite several attempts for active service in World War One as he was blind in one eye; he published his early poetry privately as by Gauthier de St Ouen, the only title surviving in general catalogues being The Sonnets of G S O: A Memorial (coll 1940); in 1902 he emigrated to Buenos Aires, Argentina, and apart from occasional excursions elsewhere remained there for the rest of his life; ...
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 ...