SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Saturday 25 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 ...
Siegel, Martin
(1938-1972) US author who died young of leukaemia. His sf novels are Agent of Entropy (1969) and The Unreal People (1973). The first combines Satire and Space Opera in a heated tale; the second is a post-holocaust Pocket-Universe tale in which Earth's surface is uninhabitable and people live frenetically and desperately Underground. [JC]
Glass, Mrs Charles Wilder
(1874-? ) US spirit medium and author, whose claim to have co-authored her three novels with a dead doctor whose spirit had been transported to Mars has not been corroborated; these novels, written in the belief that Percival Lowell had demonstrated the existence of canals on Mars, are Ruth's Marriage in Mars: A Scientific Novel (1912), Romance in Starland: A Scientific Novel (1915) and ...
Stephen, A M
(1882-1942) Canadian poet and author who served in World War One. His Lost Race tale, The Kingdom of the Sun: A Romance of the Far West Coast (1927), which is set in the sixteenth century, describes the Haida tribe of Native Americans, relicts of an advanced civilization whose population – ethnically superior to the Native Americans surrounding it – is blond and blue-eyed, and whose culture is similar ...
Invaders from Mars
1. Film (1953). National Pictures/Twentieth Century Fox. Directed by William Cameron Menzies. Written by Richard Blake (and John Tucker Battle, uncredited). Cast includes Helena Carter, Leif Erickson, Arthur Franz and Jimmy Hunt. 78 minutes (82 minutes in Europe). Colour. / A small, disturbing, curiously memorable film by the director of Things to Come (1936), made for children but capable of terrifying them. Through a little boy's ...
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 ...