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
Sponsor of the day: The League of Fan Funds
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 ...
Boston, Bruce
(1943-2024) US poet (see Poetry) and prose author whose early work tended to the surreal, but who began – with stories like "Break" for New Worlds 7 (anth 1974) edited by Hilary Bailey and Charles Platt – to invoke fantasy and sf themes. His early poetry – much of it not genre at all, and almost all of it couched in a classically lucid voice – can most easily be ...
Hilliers, Ashton
Pseudonym of UK businessman, zoologist and author Henry Marriage Wallis (1854-1941), Honorary Curator of Zoology (Vertebrates) at Reading Museum in England in the early twentieth century; his Prehistoric SF tale, The Master-Girl (1910), features, unusually, a female protagonist who carries most of the action, creates the necessary Inventions, and founds a warrior band of Amazons [see The ...
Pfeil, Fred
Working name of US academic and author John Frederick Pfeil (1949-2005), whose sf novel, Goodman 2020 (1986), portrays in a superbly suffocating present tense the Dystopian corporate USA of 2020 CE, where all power has fallen into the hands of priest-like businessmen. The most powerful of these hires Goodman in the role of "professional friend", to give him moments of human society, but Goodman eventually kills him, escapes into the barrios (and the ...
Space Children, The
Film (1958). Paramount. Directed by Jack Arnold. Written by Bernard C Schoenfeld, from a story by Tom Filer. Cast includes Jackie Coogan, Johnny Crawford, Michel Ray, Peggy Webber and Adam Williams. 69 minutes. Black and white. / This was the last of Arnold's cycle of sf films with producer William Alland, though here the studio is Paramount, not Universal. In this earnest but likeable moral fable, a group of children are "taken over" by a benign ...
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 ...