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 ...
Dark Shadows
US tv series (1966-1971). Dan Curtis Productions for ABC. Created by Dan Curtis. Producers included Curtis, Robert Costello, George DiCenzo, Peter Miner, Lela Swift and Sy Tomashoff. Directors included Lela Swift and John Sedwick. Writers included Art Wallace, Gordon Russell and Sam Hall. Cast included Alexandra Moltke (Victoria Winters), Jonathan Frid (Barnabas Collins), Joan Bennett (Elizabeth Collins), Louis Edmonds (Roger Collins), Thayer David (Ben Stokes), Grayson Hall (Julia ...
Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs
Animated film (2009). Sony Pictures Animation/Columbia Pictures. Directed by Phil Lord and Chris Miller. Written by Lord and Miller. Cast includes Anna Faris and Bill Hader. 90 minutes. Colour. / Lord and Miller made their Cinema debut with this loose adaptation of Judi and Ron Barrett's children's book Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs (1978), having previously written and directed the animated Television ...
Willson, Basil Wynne
(1868-1946) UK teacher, Anglican bishop and translator, whose free and (for its time, and considering his Christian background) relatively uncensored translation of the Vera Historia of Lucian was published as Lucian's Wonderland (1899). [JC]
Mines, Samuel
(1909-1998) US editor who worked from 1942 for Standard Magazines, the chain that published Startling Stories and Thrilling Wonder Stories. Although an sf enthusiast – he published four stories in Thrilling Wonder Stories, beginning with "Find the Sculptor" in 1946 – he concentrated mainly editing on non-sf pulps until Sam Merwin Jr left the company in 1951, ...
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 ...