SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Saturday 25 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 ...
Gattaca
Film (1997). Columbia Pictures presents a Jersey Films production. Written and directed by Andrew Niccol. Cast includes Loren Dean, Ethan Hawke, Jude Law, Uma Thurman and Gore Vidal. 106 minutes. Colour. / In a future where Genetic Engineering allows children to be optimized at conception and Eugenic DNA screening is routine in elite employment, a ...
Mihalik, Jessie
(? - ) US software engineer and author who has specialized in broad-gauge Space Operas with romance elements, female protagonists who may be princesses caught up in the kind of intrigues that normally roust Galactic Empires. Examples are the Rogue Queen sequence beginning with The Queen's Gambit (2018), featuring a queen who must win a War ...
Cobley, Michael
(1959- ) UK author long resident in Scotland. His first books, the Shadowkings trilogy beginning with Shadowkings (2001), were fantasy. However, the subsequent Humanity's Fire trilogy – comprising Seeds of Earth (2009), The Orphaned Worlds (2010) and The Ascendant Stars (2011) – is full-blooded Space Opera of considerable scope and ambition. Its starting ...
Prime Press
Short-lived (the business had failed by 1953) US Small Press specializing in sf; based in Philadelphia, founded in 1947 by Oswald Train (editorial) and James Williams, along with two fans, Alfred C Prime and Armand E Waldo, who later dropped out. Its first published title was the humorous fantasy The Mislaid Charm (February 1941 Unknown; 1947) by Alexander M ...
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 ...