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.
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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 ...
Winslow, Pauline Glen
(1926-2014) UK author, now resident in the USA, in whose I, Martha Adams (1982) the Cold War suddenly ends in a Russian nuclear strike (see World War Three) and the Invasion of an unprepared America, even though the (now assassinated) President Reagan had secretly redirected funds meant for socialist water projects into developing a secret Weapon, which the ...
Lindsey, Johanna
(1952-2019) German-born US author of romance novels, mostly with historical settings, which regularly appeared on the New York Times bestseller list; the first was Captive Bride (1977) [not listed below]. Lindsey is of sf interest for the Ly-San-Ter trilogy opening with Warrior's Woman (1990), whose tough yet virginal female protagonist goes on an interstellar quest (with a wisecracking AI sidekick) to free her world's women from ...
Tsuburaya Eiji
Working name of Eiichi Tsurumaya (1901-1970), a Japanese cameraman and producer whose work forms a key part of Japan's special effects movie tradition (see Tokusatsu). Joining Japan's nascent film business when still in his teens, he became a cinematographer and developed a considerable reputation for special effects work. During World War Two he was drafted into the Tōhō Educational Film ...
Mella, John
(circa 1942-2012) US editor – founder of Light: A Quarterly of Light Verse in 1992, which he edited until his death – and author. Transformations (fixup 1975) is an Alternate-History tale about the quest for a transvestite actor, set in a nineteenth- and twentieth-century USA and Europe transfigured by Time Distortions (the narrator, WS or William ...
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 ...