SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Sunday 19 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 ...
Poetry
The past century or so, as the SF Megatext began to form, was a period not markedly friendly to narrative verse in general, and good sf narratives in verse during this period are unsurprisingly not often found. Examples of lyric sf poetry – short poems in which sf tropes and topoi expectably uncover the state of mind of the poet – are much more common, though few of these rank very high in the literatures of the West. When identifiable sf "moves" can ...
"Space" Kingley
The tough and resourceful Captain "Space" Kingley was the hero of three UK children's Space-Opera annuals of the early 1950s. Beyond his pukka Britishness he displayed few individual characteristics. The sequence (which remains extremely difficult to date precisely; the dates here may not be reliable) comprises The Adventures of Captain "Space" Kingley (coll 1952) with stories by Ray Sonin, ...
Yu, E Lily
(? - ) US author who began publishing work of genre interest with "The Transfiguration of Maria Luisa Ortega" in The Kenyon Review for Summer 2010, her early fiction in general drawing significant attention, including the 2012 John W Campbell Award for best new writer. Though her work safely resides within the water margins of Fantastika, Yu rarely engages in sf as such, with ...
Preston, H
Pseudonym used for fiction by US technical author Henry Preston Nail (1931-2012), author of Project Deep Space (2000), set in the moderately distant Near Future as private corporations finally provide the impetus to launch Homo sapiens into interstellar space; the Invention of successively more efficient Spaceship drives is focused upon. [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 ...