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 ...
Swigart, Rob
Working name of US author and academic Eugene Robison Swigart (1941- ), whose novels, from Little America (1977) on, have been Fabulations composed in a flamboyantly brisk gonzo style through which, like Kurt Vonnegut, comprise a series of deadpan riffs on the extremities of America. Though not making up a series, his first four novels – Little America (1977), ...
Little Green Men
Jocular item of Terminology, seemingly derived from its use to describe fairies but more widely employed in sf to denote generic Aliens – most often from Mars, as widely popularized in 1940s and 1950s newspaper stories about UFOs. The titular phrase is repeated many times in the poem "The Little Green Man: A German Story" (1801) by Matthew Lewis [see The ...
Montgomery, R A
(1936-2014) US editor and author who also wrote as by Robert Mountain, first known for his contributions to the Choose Your Own Adventure sequence of non-computer-based Hypertext tales for the Young Adult market [see Checklist]; as an editor at Vermont Crossroads Press he published the first volume by Edward Packard under the series title ...
Haggard, William
Pseudonym of Richard Clayton (1907-1993), UK civil servant whose political thrillers – usually featuring Colonel Russell, Head of the Security Executive, retired after a decade but magisterially present throughout the end of the series – sometimes extrapolate on current political trends, after the fashion of their genre, from a right-wing position common to work of the 1960s; his work has been likened to that of John Buchan, though Haggard'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 ...