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.
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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 ...
Crime and Punishment
Genre fiction concerned with crime may be roughly divided into detections and thrillers. The former are problem stories; the latter exploit the melodramatic potential of the conflicts inherent in criminal deviation. For further discussion of the many forms of punishment found in sf, see the entries for Prisons and Torture. / Detective stories depend very heavily on ingenuity and generally require very fine distinctions between what ...
Cavallaro, Brittany
(1986- ) US poet and author whose Girl-King (coll of linked poems 2015 chap) effectively comprises a book-length narrative whose young female subjects interweave their life-stories, a mosaic of careers in living that often engages in the fantastic; Unhistorical (coll 2019 chap) contains an apocryphal narrative featuring Sherlock Holmes and Watson in Scotland. Her Young Adult ...
You Only Live Twice
Film (1967). Eon/United Artists. Directed by Lewis Gilbert. Written by Roald Dahl, based very loosely on You Only Live Twice (1964) by Ian Fleming. Cast includes Sean Connery, Mie Hama, Donald Pleasence, Tetsuro Tamba and Akiko Wakabayashi. 116 minutes. Colour. / Several of Fleming's James Bond novels were Technothrillers, mildly sf-oriented (though set in the ...
Trevor, Ralph
Pseudonym of UK author James Reginald Wilmot (1897-1944), active for nine years as a crime novelist before his early death; he also wrote as by Frances Stuart. He is of minor sf interest for The Ghost Counts Ten (1938), a thriller featuring a heat-melting Ray. [JC]
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 ...