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.
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 ...
Sandlin, Tim
(1950- ) US screenwriter and author, most of whose work travels to comic extremities, though the Satire remains nonfantastic. Of sf interest is Jimi Hendrix Turns Eighty (2007), set in Near Future California; it is 2023, and the real Drew Barrymore (1975- ), who is now governor, becomes involved in a dispute centred on an assisted-living centre, ...
Dogora
Japanese film (1964; original title Uchû daikaijû Dogora; vt Dagora, the Space Monster; vt Space Monster Dogora). Toho. Directed by Ishirō Honda. Written by Jojiro Okami and Shinichi Sekizawa. Cast includes Robert Dunham, Nobuo Nakamura and Yosuke Natsuki. 83 minutes. Colour. / Japanese Scientists monitoring an orbiting television satellite witness its swallowing by a giant blue amoeba; it ...
Nilsson, Peter
(1937-1998) Swedish astronomer and author. Nilsson grew up on a small farm in Möcklehult, a small rural community where the family moved in 1948. His father was a miller, carpenter and farmer, and after elementary school Nilsson started working, but had also begun reading widely and dreamt of becoming a writer and of studying the stars. He began taking correspondence courses and in 1959 graduated from secondary school. After military service, he enrolled at ...
Gorman, J T
(1869-? ) UK author of Young Adult books, usually of a military cast; he often signed himself Major J T Gorman. Of sf interest is Gorilla Gold (1937), whose young heroes traverse Africa in an autogiro, meeting a giant white gorilla and a pterodactyl en route. [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 ...