SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Wednesday 22 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 ...
Edwards, Peter
(1946- ) UK author and civil servant whose sf novel, Terminus (1976), rather ponderously sets in motion a political conflict in a twenty-second-century, Post-Holocaust Eurafrica which a sado-masochist secret society is attempting to dominate. The hero's discovery of an ancient city on Mars confuses the issue. / This author should not by confused with the Peter Edwards who illustrates children's ...
Once Upon a Time
Russian animated film (1990; original title Kogda-to davno ...; vt A Long Time Ago). Soyuzmultfilm. Directed by Galina Barinova. Written by Ante Zaninovic. Narration by Alina Pokrovskaya. 17 minutes. Colour. / In a time, we are told, so distant that it might be the deep past or Far Future, we see a City. Externally its outlines resemble a many-turreted castle; internally it is ...
Edgar, Ken
(1925-1991) US academic and author, whose sole sf work is a Young Adult tale, The Starfire (1961), a kind of Fantastic Voyage to various planets undertaken by a young lad whose Inventions include a space ship and Matter Transmission. [JC]
Osbourne, Lloyd
(1868-1947) US author, step-son of Robert Louis Stevenson, with whom he collaborated on three novels including the popular nonfantastic black comedy The Wrong Box (1889) and The Ebb-Tide: A Trio & Quartette (November 1893-February 1894 To-Day; 1894), primarily by his father-in-law [whom see for details]. Some of the tales assembled in The Queen Versus Billy and Other Stories (coll 1900) and ...
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 ...