SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Saturday 18 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 ...
Valentine, Victor
(1918-1976) Australian author, in the UK for many years from 1950, whose Cure for Death (1960) features a Ray that not only cures cancer and ageing (see Immortality) but also dissociates its patients from their own past lives in a kind of Memory Edit. [JC]
Bradfield, Scott
(1955- ) US academic, critic and author, a professor at the University of Connecticut 1989-2008. His first sf story, the orthodox "What Makes a Cage? Jamie Knows" in Protostars (anth 1971) ed David Gerrold, significantly fails to prefigure his mature works, some of the best of the latter appearing in The Secret Life of Houses (coll 1988; exp vt Dream of the Wolf 1990; further exp vt ...
Europe
Swedish rock band, formed in Stockholm in 1979, whose surprisingly enjoyable and sometimes inadvertently comical stadium rock, whilst mostly articulating predictable heavy-metal sentiments, occasionally addresses sf topics. Their first release Europe (1983), for instance, included the egregiously-titled "In the Future to Come" which warns rather incoherently of impending doom ("But one day or another / This world would maybe / Be destroyed forever / A ...
Sutherland, Morris
Pseudonym of UK author Gwendolen Sutherland Morris (?1895-? ), most of whose novels were crime fiction; of sf interest is Second Storm (1930), a Near Future Politics tale set in 1933, when Russia experiences, to its betterment, a second revolution. [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 ...