SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Monday 20 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 20 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 ...
Walt Disney Company, The
Popularly referred to as Disney, this media conglomerate has been known by the above name since 1986. Its first iteration was the Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio (1923-1926), named after its founders Walt Disney (1901-1966) and Roy O Disney (1893-1971); then The Walt Disney Studio (1926-1929); followed by Walt Disney Productions (1929-1986). Roy Disney's input to the various Disney companies involved business rather than creative matters; he was CEO until 1971 and President (the post previously ...
Truman Show, The
Film (1998). Paramount Pictures presents a Scott Rudin production. Directed by Peter Weir. Written by Andrew Niccol. Cast includes Jim Carrey, Noah Emmerich, Ed Harris, Laura Linney and Natascha McElhone. 103 minutes. Colour. / Truman Burbank (Carrey) discovers that his entire life has been lived in a 24/7 reality television show, and that his idyllic Florida community is a vast enclosed soundstage in which everyone else is an actor. / Niccol's ...
Awerbuck, Diane
(1974- ) South African author whose first novel, the highly regarded Gardening at Night (2004), is nonfantastic; she has also written in collaboration with Alex Latimer as Frank Owen. She began to publish work of genre interest with the stories assembled as Cabin Fever (coll 2011), and is of strong sf interest for the Divided States sequence comprising South (2016) and North ...
de Mille, William C
(1878-1955) US playwright, film director and screenwriter, older brother of Cecil B DeMille (1881-1959). (Note that although Cecil compressed his name to DeMille, William did not.) He wrote two plays of sf interest: "Food": A Tragedy of the Future in One Act (performed 1912 as Fifty Years from Now; 1914 chap) with Margaret Scott Oliver, a Satire in which food has become so expensive that a marriage may founder on the husband's jealous destruction ...
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 ...