SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 21 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 20 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 ...
Thomas, Elizabeth Marshall
(1931- ) US anthropologist and author whose expeditions to Africa between 1950 and 1956 resulted in her first book, the nonfiction The Harmless People (1959), about the Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert. Her two novels are of interest as intense examples of Prehistoric SF, where speculations about Homo sapiens that cannot be claimed to bear the warrant of professional testability serve as ...
Cooper, James Fenimore
(1789-1851) US author, best known for the Leather-Stocking Tales sequence in a gentlemanly frontier-adventure tale style, a set of essentially nonfantastic proto-Westerns which includes The Last of the Mohicans (1826) and many other widely read novels featuring the woodsman Natty Bumppo; he also wrote several Gothic tales containing supernatural elements, like the broad hints that the protagonist of The Spy, a Tale of the Neutral Ground ...
Colomb, Philip Howard
(1831-1899) UK naval officer and author of several works on naval strategy; he was the main author [with a number of colleagues, see Checklist] of The Great War of 189–: A Forecast (2 January-21 May 1891 Black and White as "The Great War of 1892"; dated 1893 but 1892), a highly detailed Future War description of a very wide-flung "Great War" which begins in the Balkans with an attempted assassination, leading to a conflict where Germany ...
Alraune
Film (1928; vt Unholy Love; vt Daughter of Destiny). Ama Film. Directed by Henrik Galeen. Written by Galeen, based on Alraune (1911; trans 1929) by Hanns Heinz Ewers. Cast includes Brigitte Helm, Ivan Petrovich and Paul Wegener. 125 minutes. Black and white. / A professor of genetics (Wegener) conducts a cold-blooded experiment into the Nature-versus-nurture controversy. Using the semen of a hanged man to ...
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 ...