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 ...
Willits, Malcolm
(1934-2019) US film director, bookseller, editor and author, who began to publish work of genre interest with "To Not Be Worthy" in Destiny for Winter 1950, along with several other early stories in that journal (see Amateur Magazine), which he himself co-edited with Jim Bradley. He is of more direct sf interest for The Wonderful Edison Time Machine: A Celebration of Life (1999), a Young Adult ...
President Vanishes, The
Film (1934). Walter Wanger Productions. Directed by William A Wellman. Written by Lynne Starling, based on The President Vanishes (1934) by Rex Stout (anonymous). Cast includes Edward Arnold, Arthur Byron, Peggy Conklin, Andy Devine, Paul Kelly, Rosalind Russell. 80 minutes. Black and white. / In the Near Future, with Europe already engaged in what looks like World War Two, ...
Thomas, Martin
Working name of UK author Thomas Hector Martin (1913-1985) in a career that began just after the end of World War Two; he also used the floating pseudonym Peter Saxon at least once during his association with W Howard Baker, for The Curse of Rathlaw (1968) in the Guardians psychic-investigators series. His first fantastic novel, The Evil Eye (1958) for the ...
Cosmic Encounter
Board Game (1977). Eon Products (EP). Designed by Peter Olotka, Jack Kittredge, Bill Eberle. / Cosmic Encounter is perhaps the archetypal self modifying game. Every player is given a card representing an Alien race which has a special power; examples include the ability to force players to become allies and a race which gains the abilities of another, different, card after every defeat. When the alien powers conflict ...
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 ...