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.
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 ...
Price, John-Allen
(1954- ) US author of two Near Future thrillers, Extinction Cruise (1987) and The Pursuit of the Phoenix (1990), the latter being set in near space and auguring the start of World War Three; The Apostle of Insanity Trilogy: Mutant Chronicles: Frenzy (1994), part of a series of Ties to a ...
Adam, Pip
(? - ) New Zealand author, active from 2005 or earlier. Her first novel, the Near Future I'm Working on a Building (2013), revolves around the physical and metaphysical implications of the construction of an immense, patently phallic tower; the cowers. In her third novel, Nothing to See (2020), control over human Perceptions, as exercised through modern surveillance ...
Holocaust Fiction
The term Holocaust is used in this encyclopedia to designate the fictionally popular variety of catastrophe which is directly caused by human or occasionally Alien action, intentional or otherwise. It is not normally here used to refer to the Holocaust, which is generally understood to refer to Germany's attempted extermination of the Jews of Europe (along with Slavs, gypsies, mental "defectives", etc) during ...
Nanotechnology
Item of terminology borrowed by sf writers from theoreticians of future Technology, and increasingly popular in sf from the late 1980s. It seems to have been first used by K Eric Drexler in 1976, and popularized by him in his highly optimistic book on the subject, Engines of Creation (1986). / Nanotechnology – the term loosely combines "nano", the SI (metric system) prefix denoting 10-9, with "technology" – means the technology of the ...
Robinson, Roger
(1943- ) UK computer programmer, bibliographer and publisher, active in UK Fandom for many years. The Writings of Henry Kenneth Bulmer (1983 chap; rev 1984 chap) is an exhaustive Bibliography of one of the most prolific sf writers, Kenneth Bulmer, and Who's Hugh?: An SF Reader's Guide to Pseudonyms (1987) is similarly exhaustive in its ...