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 ...
von Gunden, Kenneth
(1946- ) US author who began publishing work of genre interest with "Scrapings" in Ascents of Wonder (anth 1977) edited by David Gerrold, but whose first book of sf interest was nonfiction: Twenty All-Time Great SF Films (1982) with Stuart H Stock. He began publishing sf novels with StarSpawn (1990), which interestingly introduces an ethically advanced Hive-Mind ...
Cantor, Jay
(1948- ) US academic and author whose first novel, Krazy Kat: A Novel in Five Panels (1988), Equipoisally implants two characters from the Comic strip Krazy Kat (1916-1944) by George Herriman (1880-1944) – the eponymous Cat and Ignatz Mouse – into a "real-world" analogue of the surrealized Coconino County, Arizona, where the comic is set. Caught in this ...
Elements
Although little excitement is now aroused by the addition of yet another short-lived heavy element to the Periodic Table of Physics [see links below], new elements with extraordinary properties used to be highly popular sf devices. Public awareness of radioactivity led to much fictional exploitation of unstable, Ray-emitting nuclides, especially radium itself, and reawakening of interest in the old theme of ...
Will, John N
(? - ) Probably US author of the novella-length My Blond Princess of Space (1968 chap). [JC/DRL]
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 ...