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 ...
Wells, Martha
(1964- ) US author most of whose career has been dedicated to fantasy [a highly selected Checklist appears below], beginning with the Ile-Rien sequence whose first volume, The Element of Fire (1993; rev 2006), applies some tropes from the Fantasy of Manners toolkit [see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below] to colour in a tale of Magic. The second ...
Giger, H R
Working name of Swiss artist and theatre and film designer – but not illustrator – Hans Rudolf Giger (1940-2014). After formal training and some exhibitions of his paintings, he began displaying his distinctive style in the early 1970s. Strikingly grotesque, morbid, and necrophiliac, it draws heavily on the surrealist and decadent traditions, with acknowledged influences including Arnold Böcklin (1827-1901), Hieronymus Bosch (1460-1516), Salvador Dalí (1904-1989) and ...
Müller-Holm, Ernst
(1861-1927) Swedish-born author, in Germany from an early age, whose Ein Rückblick aus dem Jahre 2037 auf das Jahr 2000: Aus den Erinnerungen des Herrn Julian West (1891; trans anon as My Afterdream: A Sequel to the Late Mr. Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward 1900) as by Julian West is a stridently negative response to Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (1888), which is depicted as a whitewash over socialist ...
Williams-Ellis, Amabel
Nickname and working name of Mary Annabel Nassau Williams-Ellis (1894-1984), UK editor and author born Mary Annabel Strachey and under that surname an early member of the Bloomsbury Group to which her cousin Lytton Strachey (1880-1932) also belonged. After her marriage in 1915 to Clough Williams-Ellis (1883-1978) she used his surname, collaborating with him on some nonfiction works, most interestingly on Ecological threats to the environment; and participating with ...
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 ...