SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Monday 20 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 ...
Amazing Stories
"The magazine of scientifiction", with whose founding Hugo Gernsback announced the existence of sf as a distinct literary species. It was initially a letter-sized SF Magazine issued monthly by Gernsback's Experimenter Publishing Company as a companion to Science and Invention and Radio News, first issue dated April 1926, and was the first magazine to publish science fiction ...
Rolling Stones, The
UK blues-rock band formed in 1962 which has enjoyed, to some degree, both celebrity and longevity. The group is led by vocalist Mick Jagger (1943- ) and guitarist Keith Richards (1943- ), who together write most of the group's songs; the long-time drummer, from 1963, was Charlie Watts (1941-2021). The Rolling Stones merit mention here primarily for the album Their Satanic Majesties Request (1967), an uncharacteristically psychedelic ...
Quinet, Edgar
(1803-1875) French author, mostly of idealist nonfiction, active from the 1820s, in exile during the reign of the second Buonaparte 1851-1870. Of sf interest is Ahasuérus (portions appeared 1833 Revue des Deux Mondes; 1834; trans Brian Stableford as Ahasuerus 2013), which as not infrequently found in works of Proto SF combines divine and secular narratives in its recounting of the ...
Darlington, Andrew
(1947- ) UK poet and author, sometimes writing as Andy Darlington, who began to publish work of genre interest with "Stairs and Steps" in Corridor for May-June 1972; a selection of his poetry has been assembled as Euroshima Mon Amour: Poems from the Inner Mind to the Outer Limits (coll 2000 chap) (see Poetry), and a selection of his short fiction as A Saucerful of Secrets (coll 2016). Darlington's sf novel, ...
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 ...