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
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 ...
Green Arrow
DC Comics Superhero, created by Mort Weisinger and George Papp in 1941. He has no Superpowers, but his use of modestly innovative Weapons and equipment in battling criminals makes him, like Batman, of marginal sf interest, and of course he had some encounters with Aliens and ...
Atomic Platters
The name – coined by Bill Geerhart at the Conelrad website [see links below] – for a short-lived sub-genre of 1940s and 1950s pop music concerned with an atomic World War Three and its aftermath (see Holocaust). Many, though not all, of the artists and songs that might be so classified fell into later obscurity, but this was in its day a fairly lively aural manifestation of the fascinations of ...
Drennan, Paul
(1949-2003) UK author of an unremarkable sf novel, Wooden Centauri (1975), featuring the return of deep-frozen (see Cryonics) space explorers to a Dystopian Earth. [JC]
Tales of Wonder
UK Pulp magazine, sixteen issues [Summer] 1937 to Spring 1942, quarterly to 1940, thereafter slightly irregular, numbered consecutively, the first undated. Published by World's Work, London; edited by Walter Gillings. / Tales of Wonder, though preceded in 1934 by the sf Boys' Paper, Scoops, was the first adult UK sf magazine, and the use of the term "science ...
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 ...