SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Saturday 18 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 ...
Williams, Missouri
(1992- ) US editor, playwright and author, now in Prague, whose first novel The Doloriad (2022) focuses primarily on a family composed both of survivors of and those born with Mutations after a Near-Future series of planetary Disasters. Incest seems necessary, as they may be the only humans left. But the matriarchal head of the clan sends the protagonist, who was ...
Replicant
Film (2001). Millennium Films Inc/Artisan Entertainment/777 Films Corporation. Directed by Ringo Lam. Written by Lawrence David Riggins and Les Weldon. Cast includes Michael Rooker and Jean-Claude Van Damme. 96 minutes. Colour. / A sadistic thriller with sf trappings, Replicant stars Van Damme – a renowned performer in martial-arts films – in a dual role as a woman-loathing serial killer and a "replicant" (see Clones) made from his DNA. ...
Starcrash
Film (1978; vt The Adventures of Stella Star). Original Italian title Scontri stellari oltre la terza dimensione. Nat and Patrick Wachsberger Productions/New World Pictures. Directed by Lugi Cozzi (credited as Lewis Coates). Written by Cozzi and Nat Wachsberger with additional dialogue by R A Dillon. Cast includes Marjoe Gortner, David Hasselhoff, Caroline Munro, Christopher Plummer, Joe Spinell and Robert Tessier. 92 minutes. Colour. / Stella Star (Munro) and her ...
Kirk, Laurence
Pseudonym of Scottish naval officer and author Eric Andrew Simson (1895-1956), who was in active service during World War One and also published under his own name. His fiction as Kirk includes one sf novel, The Gale of the World (1948), set in a Near Future England where a scientific Discovery threatens the stability of the world. [JC]
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 ...