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.
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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 ...
Pei, Mario
(1901-1978) Italian-born linguist, translator and author, in US from 1908, best known for such popularizing texts as The Story of Language (1949). His political conservatism shapes The Sparrows of Paris (1958), where foreign villains – at least one having been exposed to Communism in his formative years – transform themselves into Werewolves and other creatures through the use of an ancient Drug in ...
Whaley, John Corey
(1984- ) US author of Young Adult fiction; his impressive first novel, Where Things Come Back (2011), is nonfantastic. But his second, Noggin (2014), depicts the Near Future surgical removal of its teenage protagonist's head (see Brain in a Box) after he has died of leukaemia, and Cryogenically stored for several ...
Science Fiction Illustrated: 1977
Letter-size saddle-stapled Cinema magazine printed on a mix of newsprint and slick paper. Published by L/C Print Publications. Editor: unknown. One issue only, 1977. / Appearing shortly before the release of Star Wars (1977), this magazine featured such productions as King Kong (1976), Logan's Run (1976) and the fantasy film ...
Twilight's Last Gleaming
Film (1977; vt Nuclear Countdown). Geria Productions/Hemdale. Directed by Robert Aldrich. Written by Ronald M Cohen, Edward Huebsch, based on Viper Three by Walter Wager. Cast includes Melvyn Douglas, Charles Durning, Burt Lancaster, Richard Widmark and Paul Winfield. 146 minutes (cut to 122 minutes). Colour. / In this borderline-sf movie, set in 1981, escaped military prisoners headed by a renegade US general take over a nuclear ICBM ...
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 ...