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
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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 ...
Webling, Peggy
Working name of UK playwright, poet and author Margaret Webling (1871-1949), active from the mid 1890s; she is of sf interest for her stage adaptation of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein; Or, the New Prometheus (1818 3vols) as Frankenstein: A Play in a Prologue and Three Acts (first performed 1927), which was revised more than once before being adapted by John L Balderston and Robert Florey ...
Middleman, The
US tv series (2008). Created by Javier Grillo-Marxuach for ABC Family. Producers include Grillo-Marxuach, Shane Keller, and John Ziffren. Directors include Jeremiah S Chechik and Michael Zinberg. Writers include Grillo-Marxuach, Les McClaine, and Andy Reaser. Cast includes Matt Keeslar as The Middleman, Natalie Morales as Wendy Watson, Brit Morgan as Lacey Thornfield, Mary Pat Gleason as Ida, and Jake Smollett as Noser. 12 one-hour episodes produced. / Based on the ...
Eyraud, Achille
(1821-1882) French playwright and author whose sole novel, Voyage à Vénus (1865; trans Brian Stableford as Voyage to Venus 2011), may be the first sf tale to feature a plausibly described Rocket-powered Spaceship. An earlier effort like Elbert Perce's Gulliver Joi: His Three Voyages (1851), also couched as a ...
Scott, John Reed
(1869-1942) US author active between 1906 and 1917, most of his tales being romantic historical adventures; of sf interest is The Duke of Oblivion (1914), set on a Caribbean Island where an Underground society of English refugees is found surviving in Mayan ruins. [JC]
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 ...