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 ...
Langford, David
(1953- ) UK author, critic, editor, publisher and sf fan, in the latter capacity recipient of 21 Hugo awards for fan writing – some of the best of his several hundred pieces are assembled as Let's Hear It for the Deaf Man (coll 1992 chap US; much exp vt The Silence of the Langford 1996; exp 2015 ebook) as Dave Langford, edited by Ben Yalow – plus five Best Fanzine Hugos ...
Dold, Elliott
(1889-1957) US illustrator, son of noted psychiatrist William Elliott Dold (1856-1942) and younger brother of Douglas Dold. His birth year is often given as 1892, but 1889 has been confirmed. Dold studied art at the College of William and Mary in Virginia to 1912, and with his brother joined the Serbian army in 1915. Although his 44 Art Deco drawings for Harold Hersey's Night (1923) are perhaps his finest work, ...
Spielberg, Steven
(1947- ) US producer, screenwriter and director; an amateur film-maker in his early teens, Spielberg completed his first sf feature – the 140-minute Firelight (1963) – at the age of 16; he studied English rather than film at college in California. His first professional film was Amblin' (1969), a slick short about hitch-hiking which was distributed as a support feature with the very successful Love Story (1970); it ...
Sleep No More
Radio anthology series (1956-1957). NBC Radio Network. Producers included Kenneth MacGregor. Announcer: Ben Grauer. Cast includes Nelson Olmstead (1914-1992). 24 15-minute and later 30-minute episodes. / Authors who had stories adapted included Ambrose Bierce, Algernon Blackwood, Jack London, Edgar Allan Poe and ...
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 ...