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.
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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 ...
Evans, Christopher
(1931-1979) UK psychologist and computer scientist perhaps best known for his nonfiction books Cults of Unreason (1973) – a witty and surprisingly sympathetic study of various aspects of Pseudoscience, in particular UFO cults and Scientology – and The Mighty Micro: The Impact of the Computer Revolution (1979; rev vt ...
Repo Man
Film (1984). Edge City Productions/Universal. Written and directed by Alex Cox. Cast includes Olivia Barash, Emilio Estevez, Harry Dean Stanton and Tracey Walter. 92 minutes. Colour. / Set in the seedier areas of Los Angeles (see California), this independent, low-budget, semi-surreal film concerns a young man (Estevez) who gets a job as a repo man – a repossessor of unpaid-for cars; his mentor (Stanton) inculcates a ...
Universe [game]
Videogame (1983). Omnitrend Software (OS). Designed by Thomas Carbone, William Leslie III. Platforms: Atari8 (1983); AppleII (1984); DOS (1987). / Universe, a largely text-based game with some outline graphics which is played in turns, is an interesting precursor to the space exploration form of Space Sim, of which the first true example was Elite (1984). As in a ...
School-Live!
Japanese animated tv series (2015); original title Gakkō Gurashi! Based on the Manga by Sadoru Chiba and Norimitsu Kaihō. Lerche. Directed by Masaomi Ando. Written by Norimitsu Kaihō. Voice cast includes Mao Ichimichi, Ai Kayano, Inori Minase, Ari Ozawa and Rie Takahashi. Twelve 24-minute episodes. Colour. / Yuki Takeya (Minase) loves school so much she lives there: the first episode has her happily mingling ...
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 ...