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.
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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 ...
Berkeley, Reginald
(1890-1935) UK soldier, politician – Liberal Member of Parliament 1922-1924 – playwright and author in various genres, in active service during World War One. Apparently inadvertently, he created one of the lasting myths of the conflict in his novel about the German execution of Edith Cavell, Dawn: A Biographical Novel of Edith Cavell (1928), in which a German soldier named Rammler refuses to participate in the firing squad, and is ...
Gilliam, Terry
(1940- ) US-born filmmaker, based in the UK from 1967; he became a British citizen in 1988. After editing a college humour magazine he became an editorial assistant and cartoonist on Harvey Kurtzmann's Help! from 1962 to 1965; after Help! folded he worked as an illustrator and copywriter for an agency in Los Angeles before moving to London to work on a short-lived magazine, The Londoner. On its demise he contributed sketches and art to television ...
Boggon, Martyn
(1934-1997) UK author of some crime fiction and of The Inevitable Hour (1968) in which, after a nuclear Holocaust destroys Chicago and much of the rest of America, a group of survivors in a claustrophobic bomb shelter engage in Post-Holocaust activities which are ultimately criminous. [JC]
Graeme, Bruce
Pseudonym of UK author Graham Montague Jeffries (1900-1982), mostly of crime stories, the best known of these being the Blackshirt sequence, beginning with Blackshirt (coll 1925), the eponymous author-with-a-secret-identity having near but not quite Superhero powers; of the stories featuring him, Blackshirt the Adventurer (1936) is of sf interest, being set (as George Locke has interestingly ...
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 ...