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
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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 ...
Vian, Boris
(1920-1959) French engineer, translator, jazz trumpeter, singer songwriter, playwright and author, his copious collected works amounting to more than fifty volumes; he was Transcendental Satrap of the Collège de 'Pataphysique, and a fine dramatist of the absurd (see Fabulation) who will be perhaps best remembered for his eloquent advocacy of American jazz, for his 400 songs (see Music) and for such plays as ...
Ondjaki
Pseudonym of Angolan author Ndalu de Almeida (1977- ), variously from the age of sixteen in Portugal and Brazil; active from around 2000. He is of sf interest (see Afrofuturism) for Os transparentes (2012; trans Stephen Henigah as Transparent City 2018), transfiguringly set in Near Future Luanda, which through governmental obliviousness and private-enterprise greed for oil has ...
Zhao Haihong
(1977- ) Chinese author, translator from English and teacher, mainly associated with the Gongshang College of Foreign Languages in Hangzhou, who won a Yinhe Award with a landslide victory for her "Yi'ekasida" ["Jocasta"] (March 1999 Kehuan Shijie), and whose short stories dominated the awards for several years thereafter. Her short story "Tui" (2000 Kehuan Shijie trans Zhao ...
Darger, Henry
(1892-1973) Self-taught US artist and author based in Chicago, who lived a reclusive existence but became posthumously notable as an outsider artist for his water-colour paintings. Of his work, 300-plus paintings were intended to be illustrations for his 15,000 page novel, nominally sf, which he called «The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion», but which is better known as ...
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 ...