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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 ...
Man Without a Body, The
UK film (1957). Filmplays Ltd. Directed by W Lee Wilder and Charles Saunders. Written by William Grote. Cast includes Julia Arnall, George Coulouris, Michael Golden, Robert Hutton, Sheldon Lawrence and Nadja Regin. 78 minutes. Black and white. / New York business mogul Karl Brussard (Coulouris) learns that his recent health problems – loss of memory (see Amnesia) and delusions – are due to an inoperable brain tumour. However, his doctor has ...
Creasey, John
(1908-1973) UK author, publisher and literary agent who began writing for the Boys' Papers in 1926, turning to adult thrillers in 1932. He wrote 562 books under (it is widely reported) 28 pseudonyms, but it is doubtful if all were exclusively by him (Michael Moorcock was at one time approached to do writing for him). Like George Griffith with his Future-War ...
Benoit, Pierre
(1886-1962) French poet and author, whose poetry preceded his service in World War One; he became a pacifist after being invalided out of the army. Many of his numerous romantic adventures contain fantastic elements, beginning with the second of them – L'Atlantide (1919; trans Arthur Chambers as The Queen of Atlantis 1920; preferred trans Mary C Tongue and Mary Ross, vt Atlantida 15 August-1 September 1920 ...
Wood, Mrs J
Pseudonym of US journalist, editor and author William Mill Butler (1857-1946); in his anti-Feminist Dystopia, Pantaletta: A Romance of Sheheland (1882) as by Mrs J Wood, the narrator, Icarus Byron Gullible (see Gulliver), having traveled to the North Pole in an Airship of his own Invention, discovers a ...
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 ...