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.
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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 ...
People Who Own the Dark, The
Spanish/US film (1976; 1980 US). Original title Ultimo deseo; vt Planeta Ciego. Cinematic Releasing Corporation (US). Produced by Jorge Luis Renena Tomayo (Spain), Sean S Cunningham (US). Directed by Léon Klimovsky. Written by Gabriel Moreno Burgos (credited as Gabriel Burgos), Vicenta Aranda and Joaquim Jordà. Cast includes Alberto de Mendoza, Teresa Gimpera, Nadiuska, Paul Naschy (credited as Paul MacKay), Tomás Picó and Julia Saly. 94 ...
Cannan, Gilbert
(1884-1955) UK translator, poet and author whose career was truncated by insanity. His first novel, Peter Homunculus (1909), is a hyperventilated tale of sexual and cultural entrapment, not fantastic. Of his subsequent wide-spread output before he was institutionalized in 1924, Windmills: A Book of Fables (coll of linked stories 1915) is of sf interest, its four long tales all dealing with the inconsistently allegorical Fatland: in two of them, a floating ...
VanderMeer, Jeff
(1968- ) US editor and author, married to Ann VanderMeer, who began to publish work of genre interest, after at least one story published in college, with "So the Dead Walk Slowly" in Fear for November 1989, and who is probably best known for the Ambergris sequence of novels and tales, which begins with two novellas, Dradin, in Love: A Tale of Elsewhen & Otherwhere (1996 chap) and ...
Brown, Charles N
(1937-2009) US publisher and editor, an sf fan who began his involvement in the field in the 1950s and who remains best known for co-founding (with Ed Meskys and Dave Vanderwerf) and running the sf news magazine Locus in 1968, initially as a Fanzine (see Newszines) addressed primarily to fans in the Boston, Massachusetts area; but eventually expanding its remit until it became the default organ of record and ...
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 ...