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 ...
American Flagg!
US Comic-book series (1983-1989, 63 issues), published by First Comics, created by writer/artist Howard V Chaykin. Generally considered one of the best sf Comics of the 1980s, American Flagg! is set in a media-saturated USA reduced to Third-World status, and stars Reuben Flagg, drafted into the Plexus Rangers in Chicago in the 2030s (Plexus being a Mars-based mega-cartel planning to sell off the ...
Harris, Frank
Working name of Irish-born UK editor, entrepreneur, playwright and author James Thomas Harris (1856-1931), who early in his life became a lawyer in the USA, but was back in the UK by 1875, using his working name from this point; he left the UK for good at the beginning of World War One. During his lifetime, he was famous for his extremely loud voice, his sexual exploits, and for general roguery; he is now best known for his erotic autobiography, My Life and Loves (1922-1927), ...
Robinsonade
Daniel Defoe's The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719) provides the name and is the central model for the robinsonade, which may be defined as the romance of solitary survival in such inimical (though ultimately compliant) terrains as desert Islands (or planets), seen as a success-story. Earlier tales do exist (in The Imaginary Voyage in Prose Fiction [1941], Philip Babcock ...
My Favorite Martian
1. US tv series (1963-1966). A Jack Chertok Production for CBS. Produced/created Jack Chertok. Writers included John L Greene, Ben Gershman, Bill Freedman, Albert E Lewin, Burt Styler. Directors include John Erman, Leslie Goodwins and Oscar Rudolph. Cast includes Bill Bixby, Pamela Britton, Roy Engel (third season), Alan Hewitt (second and third seasons), J Pat O'Malley (first season) and Ray Walston. Three seasons; 107 25-minute episodes. First two seasons black and white, third ...
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 ...