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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 ...
Appleby, Steven
(1956- ) UK/Canadian cartoonist, holding dual nationality, whose mildly surreal sf comic strip Captain Star appeared in New Musical Express from 1984, and subsequently in The Observer, Die Zeit and SFX 1998-1999. Early adventures of Captain Star's dysfunctional crew on their Spaceship The Boiling Hell are assembled as Rockets: A Way of Life by Captain J. Star (graph coll ...
Stellar Conquest
Board and counter Wargame (1974). Metagaming Concepts. Designed by Howard Thompson. / Stellar Conquest is perhaps the earliest precursor of the 4X Videogame form (see 4X Games); it inspired Reach for the Stars (1983), which was a major influence on such later games as Master of Orion (1993). Players take ...
Todorov, Tzvetan
(1939-2017) Bulgarian literary critic, in France from 1963; he pursued his postgraduate studies in Paris under the direction of the semiotic philosopher Roland Barthes (1915-1980). Among Todorov's several books and essays on structuralist criticism, all written in French, Introduction à la littérature fantastique (1970; trans Richard Howard as The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to Literary Genre 1973; US paperback 1975 with intro by Robert ...
Heat Vision and Jack
US tv pilot (1999). The Greenblatt Janollari Studio, Red Hour Productions. Directed by Ben Stiller. Created and written by Dan Harmon and Rob Schrab, Cast includes Jack Black, Ron Silver and Owen Wilson. One 30-minute episode. Colour. / A television pilot that was never picked up for a series. In the introduction Stiller, clutching his Emmy, declares that he has "returned to television a wealthy and powerful man ... [so] as a person you admire, I'm giving you permission to appreciate ...
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 ...