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
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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 ...
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, The [game]
Videogame (1984). Infocom. Designed by Douglas Adams, Steve Meretzky. Platforms: AppleII, Atari8, C64, DOS, Mac (1984); AtariST (1985); Amiga, Amstrad (1986). / Hitchhiker is a text-based Adventure game, a variation on the theme established in the ...
Tremors
Film (1989). No Frills/Wilson-Maddock/Universal. Executive producer Gale Anne Hurd. Directed by Ron Underwood. Written by S S Wilson and Brent Maddock from a story by Wilson, Maddock and Underwood. Cast includes Kevin Bacon, Finn Carter and Fred Ward. 96 minutes. Colour. / A thinly populated valley in the Nevada desert is ravaged by four monstrous subterranean worm creatures, apparently possessed of some ...
Hunger Games, The: Catching Fire
Film (2013). Lionsgate/Color Force. Directed by Francis Lawrence. Written by Simon Beaufoy and Michael Arndt, based on a novel by Suzanne Collins. Cast includes Liam Hemsworth, Josh Hutcherson, Jennifer Lawrence and Donald Sutherland. 146 minutes. Colour. / Francis Lawrence replaced Gary Ross, the director of The Hunger Games (2012), for the second adaptation of Collins's hugely popular series; ...
Parks and Recreation
US tv series (2009-2015). NBC Universal, Deedle Dee, Fremulon, 3Arts, Schur Films, Universal Media Studios. Directed by Dean Holland, Tom McGill, Michael Schur and others. Written by Megan Amram, Aisha Muharrar, Matt Murray, Amy Poehler, Michael Schur, Jen Statsky, Harris Wittels, Alan Yang and others. Cast includes Aziz Ansari, Jim O'Heir, Aubrey Plaza, Amy Poehler, Chris Pratt and Adam Scott. 125 22-minute episodes. / Earnest civil servant Leslie Knope (Poehler) idolizes women in ...
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 ...