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
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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 ...
Wright, W George
(? -? ) UK author of fiction for boys, who also wrote as by Howard Grant and Paul Quinton. In The School in the Air: A Splendid Long Complete Story of Schoolboy Fun & Adventure All Over the World (28 October 1922-6 January 1923 Pluck; 1924 chap) and Wings of Adventure: An Exciting Yarn of Schoolboy Travel & Adventure on an Air Trip to Africa (13 January-14 April 1923 Pluck; 1926 chap), both as by Paul Quinton, a ...
Explorers
Film (1985). Edward S Feldman/Paramount. Directed by Joe Dante. Written by Eric Luke. Cast includes Ethan Hawke, River Phoenix and Jason Presson. 109 minutes. Colour. / Three schoolboys (Hawke, Phoenix, Presson), tipped off by a dream, employ a Computer to help create a sphere that can move very quickly and is impervious to Gravity; they use it to power a ...
Hammond, Warren
(? - ) US author of the ongoing KOP sequence of noir detective thrillers set in a complexly grim City on a colony planet, beginning with KOP (2007) and EX-KOP (2008). The first volumes are powerful though not innovative. [JC]
Rata
Pseudonym of Welsh-born journalist and author Thomas Richard Roydhouse (1862-1943), in New Zealand from the late 1880s and then Australia; in his Near Future Yellow Peril novel, The Coloured Conquest (1904), Japan conquers Australia and the rest of the world; by 1913 whites everywhere are doomed. [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 ...