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
Sponsor of the day: Andy Richards of Cold Tonnage Books
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 ...
Farscape
Australian-American tv series (1999-2003, 2005). Jim Henson Productions for The Sci Fi Channel and Nine Network Australia. Created by Rockne S O'Bannon. Producers include Robert Halmi Jr, Brian Henson, David Kemper and Richard Manning. Directors include Andrew Prowse, Tony Tilse, Ian Watson and Rowan Woods. Writers include Kemper, Manning, Justin Monjo and O'Bannon. Cast includes Ben Browder as John Crichton, Claudia Black as Aeryn Sun, Anthony Simcoe as Ka D'Argo, Virginia Hey as ...
Emerson Lake and Palmer
Also known as ELP. British prog-rock band, formed by Keith Emerson (1944-2016), Greg Lake (1947-2016) and Carl Palmer (1950- ). The group's second album Tarkus (1971) includes in its 20-minute title-track a multi-part narrative of a monstrous "Tarkus" fighting a Future War in a future (or perhaps Alternate-History) Earth. The evidence of the album cover-art, although not the song's lyrics ...
Castilla, Clyde Andre
(1907-1983) US author of a belated lost Atlantis tale, Shara-Li (1958), whose air of antiquity is somewhat alleviated by the construction during the course of the tale of a spaceship capable of interstellar flight. [JC]
Dooner, Pierton W
(1844-1907) Canadian-born editor and author who immigrated to the USA in 1861. His Near Future tale, Last Days of the Republic (1880), was the first US Yellow Peril novel that could be described in sf terms, and demonstrates the terribly common dynamic by which a guilty party, or nation, feels compelled to transfer its guilt to the victim or victim-nation: in 1880, the year of the book's publication, Chinese coolies ...
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 ...