SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Wednesday 22 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 20 January 2025
Sponsor of the day: Conversation 2023
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 ...
Neilson, Keith
(1935- ) US academic of importance in the field of sf and fantasy scholarship for editing (anonymously: both books were created under the umbrella editorship of Frank N Magill) the Survey of Science Fiction Literature [for subtitle see Checklist] (anth 1979 5vols) and the Survey of Modern Fantasy Literature (anth 1983 5vols); the first contains 500 and the second about 500 essays, averaging some 2000 words, on ...
Jenkins, T M
(? - ) UK journalist now in the USA, whose The Waking (2006) begins as a medical thriller about Cloning, but soon expands into a complex murder mystery set in 2070. The Immortalists (2008) also moves some distance from its beginnings in the medical hunt for Immortality. [JC]
Groff, Lauren
(1978- ) US anthologist and author, active from around 2005, most of whose work is nonfantastic, though the consumerist America that traps her protagonists seems hellbound into Ecological suicide; her tales often therefore seem to register (if only tacitly) a pressure of unease awaiting us at the crossroads into the next day, which may no longer be mundane. Her second novel, Arcadia (2012), does in fact devolve into a full sf ...
Minor, Wendell
(1944- ) US artist, author and illustrator, initially in association with Paul Bacon, whose concern and hands-on responsibility for typography he shares; his first covers date from 1968. The intensely enhanced Magic Realism of his work, much of it depicting rural America, has been influential from the 1970s. In contrast to the overdetermined populousness of the work of Norman Rockwell (1894-1978), his works ...
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 ...