SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Saturday 25 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 24 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 ...
Justice, Keith L
(1949-2004) US journalist, teacher and bibliographer, active for many years (until his accidental death) as a reporter for various Ohio papers; though not a fiction writer, he did publish one story of genre interest, "The Symbol Hunter" in Unearth for Spring 1977. To the field of sf Bibliography he contributed two titles, both useful when released though inevitably superseded: Science Fiction Master Index of Names ...
Stroyar, J N
(? - ) US physicist and author, resident in Germany; her Children's War sequence – comprising The Children's War (2001), which won the Sidewise Award for 2001, A Change of Regime (2004) and Becoming Them: As Once in a Dream (2017) – is set in a Hitler Wins Alternate History version of ...
UFOs
A common item of Terminology, both inside and outside sf: UFO is an acronym for Unidentified Flying Object. In the first edition of this encyclopedia in 1979, the subject of ufology was discussed under the heading "Flying Saucers". The change of title reflects the fact that ufology itself has changed over subsequent decades, and may now be thought of almost as three separate disciplines or interpretations of the phenomenon, one of which (the extraterrestrial ...
Collier's Weekly
US news and general interest magazine, noted early in its existence for its investigative journalism; counted as one of the Slicks although for most of its run it was in tabloid format. It was founded by the Irish immigrant Peter Fenelon Collier (1849-1909) as Collier's Once A Week from 28 April 1888, edited by fellow Irishman Nugent Robinson. It became Collier's Weekly in 1895 and simply Collier's from 1905. It remained weekly to 25 July 1953, ...
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 ...