SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Wednesday 22 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 ...
Big Man Japan
Japanese film (2007). Original title Dai Nipponjin. Directed by Hitoshi Matsumoto. Written by Hitoshi Matsumoto and Mitsuyoshi Takasu. Cast includes Shion Machida, Hitoshi Matsumoto, Daisuke Miyagawa and Taichi Yazaki. 114 minutes. Colour. / A documentary crew are following Masaru Daisatou (Matsumoto), an unprepossessing middle-aged man with a fondness for folding umbrellas: "they only get big when you need them to" (a similar remark is made ...
Mediascene
Tabloid-size Media Magazine. Publisher: James Steranko as Supergraphics Publications. Editor: Steranko. 41 issues, 1972 to 1979. / While not an sf or fantasy Media Magazine per se, this title from Comics artist and author Steranko included a good deal of material on these genres. Starting life as Comixscene, it became Mediascene with issue ...
Lacroix, Paul
(1806-1884) French bibliographer and author who published under a variety of names, including P L Jacob and Bibliophile, and who was possibly an anonymous collaborator with Victor Hugo (1802-1885) and certainly did anonymous work for Alexandre Dumas. He is of sf interest for La Danse Macabre: histoire fantastique du XVème siecle (1832 as by P L Jacob, Bibliophile; trans Brian Stableford as ...
Nagayama Yasuo
(1962- ) Japanese dentist and historian, author of several dozen works on varied non-genre or Equipoisal subjects, including true crime, youth culture and modern parenting. Nagayama rose to prominence in the field of sf criticism in the early twenty-first century, as editor of several compilations of early Japanese genre work (including a collection of Jūza Unno's stories), ...
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 ...