SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Friday 24 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 24 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 ...
Anderson, Gerry
(1929-2012) UK television producer and author, born Gerald Alexander Abrahams, who worked closely with his wife Sylvia Anderson; he was also an animator and she a voice artist. They will forever be remembered for a succession of 1960s children's puppet adventure shows on television that occasionally dealt with sf themes on a far more extensive scale than contemporary adult programming. Gerry Anderson's first two series, The Adventures of Twizzle (1958) and ...
Rohmer, Sax
Pseudonym of UK stage lyricist, journalist and author Arthur Henry Ward (1883-1959), who began calling himself Arthur Sarsfield Ward after his mother's death in 1901; he signed some early stories as A Sarsfield Ward, including his first work of genre interest, "The Mysterious Mummy" in Pearson's Weekly for the Christmas Issue, 24 November 1903. He also published various early work in Cassell's Magazine, Chambers Journal, ...
Causo, Roberto de Sousa
(1965- ) Brazilian editor, critic and science fiction author, Roberto de Sousa Causo is a long-time correspondent for the American sf magazine Locus. In 2005, he also began publishing an initially weekly column about sf for Terra Magazine, an electronic platform of the Brazilian media giant Portal Terra. In addition to being a prolific sf writer in his own right, Causo currently works as a freelance editor for ...
Toys in SF
Extrapolations of children's Toys are encountered from time to time in science fiction, often to sinister effect. The ironic reversal of innocence that makes malign Children in SF such an effective trope extends to their dangerous, untrustworthy or subversive playthings. / The toys dumped into the twentieth century via Time Travel in Henry Kuttner's "Mimsy Were the ...
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 ...