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 ...
Kidd, Chip
(1964- ) American book designer, artist, editor, and author. After receiving artistic training at Penn State University, he began doing book design for Alfred A Knopf in 1986 and has since done freelance work for other publishers. While others in his profession, like Carol Russo and Ray Lundgren, make little effort to draw attention to themselves, Kidd has innovatively transformed himself into a celebrity, ...
Chronister, Kay
(? - ) US author, best known for horror fiction in short story form, beginning with "The Warriors, the Mothers, the Drowned" in Beneath Ceaseless Seas for 28 May 2015, much of this work being assembled as Thin Places (coll 2020). Her first novel, the Young Adult Desert Creatures (2022), conveys its young protagonist and her father on a Fantastic Voyage ...
MacVicar, Angus
(1908-2001) Scottish author known from 1933 for crime thrillers; his autobiographies and Children's SF came later in his career. The first three volumes of his Lost Planet sequence – The Lost Planet (1953), Return to the Lost Planet (1954) and Secret of the Lost Planet (1955) – engagingly described space journeys to reach, explore and ultimately defend the minor planet Hesikos. MacVicar portrayed ...
Ikin, Van
(1951- ) Australian academic, editor and author who began publishing sf stories with "The Living Water" for Pocket Man in 1968, and published short work with some frequency for the next two decades. In 1977, he founded Science Fiction: A Review of Speculative Literature, which he edited until 1997. He also edited three anthologies: Australian Science Fiction (anth 1982), which ...
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 ...