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 ...
Wondrous Web Worlds
US Anthology series published annually from 2001 to the present and edited by J Alan Erwine. The first two volumes were published by Pro Mart Publishing, Carmichael, California, but all subsequent volumes have been published by Sam's Dot Publishing, Cedar Rapids, Iowa. The anthology selects the stories and poems voted by readers as the best in Sam's Dot's Online Magazines: The ...
Heroic Fantasy
In the Terminology of sf/fantasy readers, this term began in the late 1970s to overtake Sword and Sorcery as the name of the subgenre which we choose – perhaps arbitrarily – to discuss under the latter head. The two terms (which both continue in common but diminished usage) are close but not identical in meaning. However, the nuances that distinguish them differ according to the writer (or blurb-writer) who uses ...
Mayakovsky, Vladimir
(1893-1930) Russian poet and playwright, a revolutionary from early years, a Futurist poet whose verse radically shocked post-Revolution Russia. Of particular sf interest is his first fully fledged prose Satirical play, Klop (performed 1929; 1929; trans Guy Daniels as The Bedbug in The Complete Plays of Vladimir Mayakovsky, coll 1968), in which, fifty years after he falls into a state of ...
Shumway, Harry Irving
(1883-1974) US author whose The Wonderful Voyages of Cap'n Pen (coll 1929) comprises a set of tales told within a Club Story setting, and clearly fantasticated. "The Voyage of the Good Ship Luna" ostensibly carries the Captain to the Moon by Rocket, but a misfire may make this outcome doubtful. Most of the tales are nautical. [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 ...