SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Sunday 26 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 ...
McKinney, Chris
(1973- ) US teacher and author, active in both capacities from before 2000. His first novel, Tattoo (1999), is nonfantastic. He is of sf interest for some of the stories assembled in The Lunacy Machine: Twisted Tales of Unfortunate Times (coll 2007), and for the Water City sequence beginning with Midnight, Water City (2021), set in a distant Near-Future ...
Colossus, the Forbin Project
Film (1969; vt The Forbin Project). Universal. Directed by Joseph Sargent. Written by James Bridges, based on Colossus (1966) by D F Jones. Cast includes Eric Braeden, Susan Clark, Paul Frees (uncredited) Gordon Pinsent and William Schallert. 100 minutes. Colour. / A supercomputer, Colossus, is designed by Dr Charles Forbin (Braeden) to take control of the US defence network. After being activated and lauded by the President ...
Russell, Alan K
Pseudonym of UK publisher and anthologist Lionel Leventhal (1937- ), founder or co-founder of several firms, including Arms and Armour Press and Greenhill Press; at one point he also controlled Lund Humphries Publishing and Chatham Publishing. Leventhal is of genre interest for the Anthologies listed below, all reproduced from the original illustrated magazines, and all edited as by Alan K Russell; he also signed some material as by A ...
Sackville-West, V
(1892-1962) UK author, married to Harold Nicolson and renowned for her creation of the garden at Sissinghurst, Kent; she was christened Victoria, but was almost always called Vita, to avoid confusion with her mother, also Victoria. A member of the Bloomsbury Group and a model for the title character of Virginia Woolf's Orlando (1928), she was best known for non-genre novels like The Edwardians ...
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 ...