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.
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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 ...
Battle for the Planet of the Apes
Film (1973). Apjac/Twentieth Century Fox. Director J Lee Thompson. Written by John William Corrington, Joyce Hooper Corrington, based on a story by Paul Dehn. Cast includes Claude Akins, Lew Ayres, John Huston, Roddy McDowall and Natalie Trundy. USA 93 minutes, UK 86 minutes. Colour. / The fifth and last of the series beginning with Planet of the Apes (to which this is a "prequel") and the most disappointing. ...
Schomburg, Alex
(1905-1998) US illustrator and Comic-book artist; he occasionally spelled his name Schomberg, and in his early career sometimes signed his work as Xela. His first assignment was for Hugo Gernsback in 1925; he did his first cover in that year for Science and Invention. During his 65-year career, which extended into the 1980s with covers for ...
Barillet-Lagargousse
Pseudonym of the unidentified French author (? -? ) of a Future War novel, La guerre final, histoire fantastique (1885; trans Brian Stableford as The Final War: A Fantastic Story coll 2014), whose name on the title page is expanded to Barillet-Lagargousse, Ingénieur destructeur ["Engineer of Destruction"]. The English translation also includes a ...
Wludyka, Peter
(1942- ) US academic and author whose The Past Is Another Country (1988; vt USSA: The Past is Another Country: A Novel of Alternate History 2010) describes an America, 143 years after a Russian invasion, in which thought-control is almost complete. The young protagonist discovers some of the truth about Christ and the disappeared city of New York, but only at great cost. Unfortunately for ...
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 ...