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 ...
Lange, Oliver
Pseudonym of US author, artist and critic John Wadleigh (1927-2013), who in the late 1950s was an editorial assistant at The New Yorker. His best known novel is Vandenberg (1971; vt Defiance: An American Novel 1984), a Near Future tale whose eponymous hero – along with other New Mexican mavericks – fights to the death against the Soviet Invasion and takeover of the USA, retreating to the ...
Moore, Chris
(1947- ) Prolific UK artist, known to the public primarily for his hard-edged treatment of Hard SF subjects, although in fact he produces covers in different styles for all sorts of other genres as well; he has illustrated record sleeves for artists as diverse as Rod Stewart, Fleetwood Mac, Status Quo and Pentangle. What impresses most about Moore's sf art is not just the photographic realism but the sense of scale, which is achieved ...
Tanton, Bruce
(1946- ) UK-born author in Australia from the age of nine; of his Young Adult novels, one is sf, The Jericho Factor (1993), a Space Opera in which Homo sapiens is threatened by an Alien intelligence. [JC]
Smith, Artegall
Pseudonym – in full The Right Rev Artegall Smith, D.D. – of Philip Norton (1841-1924), UK clergyman and author, active in the former capacity 1871-1924. As Artegall Smith he published one sf novel, Sub Sole, or Under the Sun: Missionary Adventures in the Great Sahara (1889), in which the Wandering Jew reveals to Artegall Smith the wonders of an Underground Lost World ...
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 ...