SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 21 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: The Telluride Institute
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 ...
Unusual Stories
US Digest-size magazine. Three issues March 1934 to Winter 1935, published by Fantasy Publishers, Everett, Pennsylvania; edited by William L Crawford. An advance issue of this Semiprozine (see also Small Presses) was published (and mailed) in two parts in 1934, and could be considered as #1, even though the 1935 issues are referred to as #1 ...
Kavenna, Joanna
(? - ) UK journalist and author some of whose novels make sophisticated use of the SF Megatext, like her second, The Birth of Love (2010), where an intense narrative analysis and presentation of the nature of childbirth is broken into four sequences, the first three of them nonfantastic. The fourth narrative is set in a Dystopian Near Future, a ...
Journey of Allen Strange, The
US tv series (1997-2000). Lynch Entertainment for Nickelodeon network. Created by Tommy Lynch. Produced by Paul Hoen and Robert C Mora. Directors included Topper Carew, Hoen, Shawn Levy, Jason Marsden and Lev L Spiro. Writers included Suzanne Bloch, Jean Gennis, Lynch and Phyllis Murphy. Cast includes Dee Bradley Baker, Erin J Dean, Arjay Smith, Shane Sweet, Jack Tate and Mary Chris Wall. 39 25-minute episodes. Colour. / After stowing away on an interstellar transport ...
Payne, Rob
(1973- ) Canadian-born author, now in Australia, of the How to Save the World sequence, so far comprising How to Be a Hero on Earth 5 (2006), a Young Adult sf tale involving Parallel Worlds, and its sequel How to Save the World Again (2007). [JC]
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 ...