SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 21 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
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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 ...
Far Out Space Nuts
Juvenile tv series (1975-1976). Sid and Marty Krofft Enterprises for CBS-TV. Created by Sid and Marty Krofft (see The Krofft Brothers) with Joe Ruby and Ken Spears. Directors include Claudio Guzman, Wes Kenny and Walter C Miller. Writers include Chuck McCann, Earle Doud and Duane Poole. Cast includes Bob Denver, Patti Maloney and Chuck McCann. 15 25-minute episodes. Colour. / Two inept maintenance workers at a ...
Battle Royale
Japanese film (2000). Toei Company presents a GAGA, Kobi Co, MF Pictures, Nippon Shuppan Hanbai (Nippan) K K and WOWOW production in association with AM Associates and Fukasaku-gumi. Directed by Kinji Fukasaku. Written by Kenta Fukasaku from the novel Battle Royale by Kōshun Takami. Cast includes Masanobu Ando, Tatsuya Fujiwara, Takeshi Kitano, Chiaki Kuriyama, Aki Maeda and Tarō Yamamoto. 114 minutes. Colour. / ...
Magnus, Leonard A
(1879-1924) UK linguist, author, translator and textual scholar who specialized in Russian literature; of sf interest is A Japanese Utopia (1905), whose Japanese protagonist finds, in a Lost World north of Japan, an advanced, benignly anarchic Utopia. According to his Times obituary he died after, while travelling through Russia collecting folktales and folklore for a forthcoming book, he was "attacked by a ...
Slipstream
Film (1989). Entertainment Film Productions. Produced by Gary Kurtz. Directed by Steven M Lisberger. Written by Tony Kayden, based on a story by Bill Bauer. Cast includes Kitty Aldridge, Eleanor David, Mark Hamill, Ben Kingsley, Bill Paxton and Bob Peck. 102 minutes. Colour. / Unspecified ecological rape has led to great earthquakes and geological changes all over the world. A strong, constant "river" of wind, the Slipstream, blows always in one direction across a scarred landscape ...
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 ...