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.
Site updated on 17 January 2025
Sponsor of the day: Andy Richards of Cold Tonnage Books
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 ...
Hamilton, Edmond
(1904-1977) US author, married to Leigh Brackett from 1946 until his death. With E E "Doc" Smith and Jack Williamson, he was one of the prime movers in the development of US sf, sharing with those writers in the creation and popularization of classic Space Opera as it first appeared in Pulp magazines from about 1928. His first story, ...
Klinger, Friedrich Maximilian von
(1752-1831) German playwright and author; the title of his early play, Sturm und Drang (1776), gave its name to the period of tempestuous anti-Enlightenment Early Romantism in Germany dominant during the 1770s and 1780s. He is of sf interest for a novel, Reisen vor der Sündfluth (1795; trans anon as ...
Harrow, Alix E
(1989- ) US author who began to publish work of genre interest with "A Whisper in the Weld" in Shimmer for November 2014; The Autobiography of a Traitor and a Half-Savage (2016 ebook), a novelette, is set in an Alternate World version of a reality where the land itself organically intertwines with the maps that attempt to draw it; she won a Hugo award for "A Witch's ...
Madhouse
Japanese animation studio, based in Nakano, Tokyo and founded in 1972 by Osamu Dezaki, Yoshiaki Kawajiri, Masao Maruyama and Rintaro (real name Shigeyuki Hayashi, confused by some sources with his brother Masayuki Hayashi), who were former employees of Osamu Tezuka's Mushi Production studio (aka Mushi Pro). In 2004 the studio became a subsidiary of the Index Corporation; then, from 2011, of Nippon TV. / Madhouse's ...
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 ...