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 24 January 2025
Sponsor of the day: Joe Haldeman
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 ...
Tabori, Paul
Working (and later legal) name of Hungarian journalist, screenwriter, translator, broadcaster, literary agent and author Pál Tábori (1908-1974), brother of George Tabori, active in Hungary from as early as 1925 with A sárga selyem Turbán ["The Yellow Silk Turban"], a translation of an unidentified Jack London story. His early fiction, beginning with Új-Buda ["New Buda"] ...
Fulton, John P
(1902-1966) Pioneering special effects photographer. Moving from Nebraska to California in 1914, Fulton worked for a time as a land surveyor due to his father's strong opposition to his becoming involved with the Cinema industry. He started work for D W Griffith as an assistant cameraman in the 1920s, then moved to Universal Pictures after more experience learning the basics of optical composition, and traveling matte photography. His first genre credit was ...
Curval, Philippe
Pseudonym of French author, journalist and artist Philippe Tronche (1929-2023). From around 1956 Curval was central to the growth of sf in France as bookseller, magazine editor, photographer, chronicler and author. He was a fine stylist whose works, though often they are couched as Satires, are exemplified by a sensual, poetic mood and great affection for his characters. He wrote over thirty stories, beginning with "L'oeuf d'Elduo" ...
Inhabitant, The
Pseudonym of unidentified New Zealand author (? -? ) whose Sleeper Awakes tale – published in two volumes as The Great Romance, Vol 1 (1881 chap) and The Great Romance, Vol 2 (1881 chap), with a possible lost third volume, the first two assembled as The Great Romance: A Rediscovered Utopian Adventure (omni 2008) – may be the first sf text to convey its protagonist into the ...
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 ...