SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Sunday 19 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 17 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 ...
Buchholz, Matthew
(? -? ) US artist and author, initially sf interest for Alternate Histories of the World (graph 2013), a fantasticated chronological sequence of images taken from various historical (or quasi-historical) events, each of them textually and visually estranged into Alternate History understandings of the events in question. Sometimes the estrangements read as sf, sometimes as fantasy, sometimes as delusion, ...
Aiken, Joan
(1924-2004) UK author, daughter of Conrad Aiken, stepdaughter of Martin Armstrong [for both men see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below], and sister of John Aiken; best known as a highly prolific author of fantasy for children and Young Adult readers. Almost none of her many adult novels contain explicit fantasy content, though some have supernatural ...
Toynbee, Polly
(1946- ) UK journalist and author; she is of the fourth generation of Toynbees to be involved in literature. Leftovers (1966) depicts with feeble verve the mixed destinies of a group of youths in a deserted London, survivors of an obscurely described poisonous gas (see Poison) (or possibly a neutron bomb) which has destroyed the rest of humanity. There are some moments with some ...
Serpentarius
US downloadable Online Magazine published by Nancy Dix, Sidney, Nebraska. It was intended as a quarterly magazine paying up to professional rates, but the website was regularly hacked and the magazine closed down after one issue, January/March 2008. That issue is still available at the website below. This was really only a trial issue with little chance to show its full potential. It carried fiction by Cat Rambo and Chet ...
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 ...