SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Friday 24 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
Sponsor of the day: Glasgow 2024 (Worldcon)
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 ...
Survival Horror
Term used to describe a form of Videogame which, unusually amongst game forms, is defined by its tone and ambience rather than by its gameplay. As the name suggests, Survival Horror games are characterized by vulnerable protagonists attempting to escape from menacing and disturbing situations, almost always of a fantastic nature. The gameplay most often resembles that of an action Adventure, though in a Survival Horror game the player ...
Reynolds, Anthony
(? - ) Australian author who has worked for Games Workshop, which owns the Warhammer 40,000 universe, and who has written Ties for that universe, beginning with Warhammer: Mark of Chaos (2006). Of more sf interest are his contributions to the Warhammer 40,000 subseries, beginning with Warhammer 40,000: Dark Apostle (2007); his tales revel duly in the bleak and ...
Galaxy Science Fiction Novels
A companion series to Galaxy Science Fiction. The first 31 issues of these numbered books, which resembled magazines, were published irregularly, 1950-1957, in Digest format, and a further four, 1957-1959, were issued in standard paperback format. #1-#7 (1950-1951) were published by World Editions, #9-#35 (1952-1959) by Galaxy Publishing Corp. The series was then taken over by Beacon Books, a publisher specializing in mild pornography, ...
Bartlett, Mike
(1980- ) UK playwright, at least three of whose plays have sf elements. The 1968-2525 timespan of Earthquakes in London (performed 4 August 2010 Cottesloe Theatre, London; 2010) includes realist historical scenes and events in both contemporary and Near Future London, as well as visions of a Ruined Earth, scenes set in the future comprising enacted scenes as well as ...
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 ...