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.
Site updated on 24 January 2025
Sponsor of the day: Joe Haldeman
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 ...
Moffitt, Donald
(1931-2014) US author who started publishing work of genre interest with "The Devil's Due" for Fantastic in May 1960. His first outright sf novel is The Jupiter Theft (1977), a tale which established him as an author of numerate, physics-oriented, fast-moving Hard-SF adventures (see Jupiter). After some years of silence came the Genesis series – The Genesis Quest (1986) ...
Satifka, Erica L
(? - ) US author who began publishing work of genre interest with "Automatic" in Clarkesworld for January 2007, set like much of her short work in a Dystopian urban Near Future populated by outlier figures, some of them modified humans, some of them artifacts. How to Get to Apocalypse and Other Disasters (coll 2021) generously represents this ...
Hickson, Ella
(1985- ) UK playwright whose Wendy & Peter Pan (performed 10 December 2013; 2014) is a Feminist restructuring of J M Barrie's version of the title characters, mostly adapting his Peter and Wendy (1911) [for J M Barrie see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below]. Of more direct sf interest is Oil (performed 7 October 2016; 2016), ...
Fantastic Metropolis
US cumulative Online Magazine more akin to a website. It ran from 15 October 2001 to 1 January 2006, though the last release was four months late, and though there were regular monthly uploads of fiction and other features these were not in the form of individual issues. It was started by Gabe Chouinard in order to highlight the wider potential of literary science fiction rather than the traditional or commercial material, with an emphasis on urban fiction ...
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 ...