SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 21 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 ...
Xenoforming
A term logically based on the more familiar Terraforming, to denote the (usually gradual) transformation of a world to suit Alien rather than Earth-human Biology and Ecology. / The highest sf drama arises when xenoforming attempts are initiated by Extraterrestrials wishing to transform Earth for their own purposes. The Red Weed introduced ...
Speculon
US professional Online Magazine published by Timothy Cooper, which ran for at least fifteen issues between August 2000 and January 2003, although virtually nothing can now be accessed on the internet. It began as an amateur magazine with a rather bland website and little promise. Cooper was frustrated with the lack of response to the issue and by receiving only two unsolicited submissions. He sought financial backing, which he obtained, and with that was ...
Whitaker, David
(1928-1980) UK Television scriptwriter and editor who as the first story editor of Doctor Who oversaw the writing of this series' first 51 episodes (1963-1964) and contributed several scripts of his own in the mid- to late 1960s. Whitaker wrote the first Doctor Who novelization, Doctor Who in an Exciting Adventure with the Daleks (1964; vt Doctor Who and the Daleks 1973). This well-crafted ...
Axler, James
A House Name used by the Gold Eagle Books division of Harlequin Enterprises Ltd – Harlequin also published the Laser Books series in the 1970s – for various series, three of them of sf interest, two of these being extremely long. Deathlands (over 120 volumes) begins as a Ruined Earth sequence set 100 years after nuclear war has terminated civilization in 2001 in a ...
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 ...