SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Sunday 19 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 ...
Wessex, Martyn
Pseudonym of UK author P F Little (? - ) for two sf novels written for Robert Hale Limited: The Slowing Down Process (1974), in which a space capsule returns to Earth with a dead astronaut and the seeds of a lethal Pandemic; and Chain Reaction (1976), where human fertility is endangered by the effects of a new Drug. [JC/DRL]
Music
This article deals with music as it is portrayed and speculated about in sf. For discussion of actual music with sf themes, see SF Music. / Of the Arts, music is the one most commonly featured in sf – albeit not quite to the extent that Fantasy is pervaded by it. Several sf writers studied it, notably including Lloyd Biggle Jr (PhD in musicology), Langdon ...
Invasion America
US animated tv mini-series (1998). DreamWorks Animation for The Warner Brothers Television Network. Created by Steven Spielberg and Harve Bennett. Produced by Dan Fausett and Michael Reaves. Directors included Patrick Archibald and Fausett. Writers included Ruel Fischmann, Wayne Lemon, and Reaves. Cast includes Edward Albert, Tony Jay, Mikey Kelley, Lorenzo Lamas, Leonard Nimoy, James Sikking and Kath Soucie. 13 ...
Wolf, David
(1951- ) US physiologist and author, a research scientist whose experience is reflected in his sf novel, King of Infinite Space: A Murder Mystery (1998), a medical Technothriller in which young women are experimentally enclosed in giant water-filled capsules (see Sex; Women in SF), where their thoughts are exposed by a kind of mechanized ...
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 ...