SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Saturday 25 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 24 January 2025
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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 ...
Gillon, Diana
(1915-2016) UK author born Diana Pleasance Case and married to Meir Selig Goldstein in June 1937; they changed their surnames to Gillon while living in Jerusalem in the 1940s, prior to their 1948 return to London. Her sf novel, The Unsleep (1961) with Meir Gillon, describes the effect of the Drug Sta-Wake which, by enforcing sleeplessness, contributes to the creation of an admass Dystopia. ...
Dean, Frederic Alva
(circa 1860-1936) US author of a Lost Race novel, The Heroines of Petoséga (1889), which traces the history of the survivors of an ancient Disaster which destroys pre-Attic Greece in about 1000 BCE, and who found the exquisite city of Petoséga on what is now known as Mackinac Island in present-day Michigan. But Petoséga is destroyed more than once by a vast ...
Second Best Hospital in the Galaxy, The
US animated tv series (2024). Rat Ghost, Animal Pictures, Titmouse Inc, Amazon Studios. Created by Cirocco Dunlap. Directed by Joey Adams, Kacie Hermanson and Becks Wallace. Writers include Joanna Bradley, Cirocco Dunlap, Kirsten King, Anne Lane, Shauna McGarry and Asha Michelle Wilson. Voice cast includes Kieran Culkin, Andrew Dismukes, Stephanie Hsu, Natasha Lyonne, Keke Palmer, Lennon Parham, Maya Rudolph, Sam Smith and Gary Anthony Williams. Eight 27-minute episodes. / Dr. Sleech ...
Beason, Doug
(1953- ) US author and officer in the USAF with a PhD in physics who began publishing sf with "The Man I'll Never Be" for Amazing in May 1987. Return to Honor (1989), Assault on Alpha Base (1990) and Strike Eagle (1991) are Technothrillers, but Lifeline (1990) with Kevin J Anderson is of sf interest, and marked both ...
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 ...