SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Saturday 18 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 17 January 2025
Sponsor of the day: The League of Fan Funds
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 ...
MacKaye, Harold Steele
(1866-1928) French-born lawyer and author, in US from infancy, son of the playwright and theatrical impresario Steele MacKaye (1842-1894) and brother of the author Percy MacKaye (1875-1956). Of sf interest is his novel, The Panchronicon (1904), a Time-Travel story whimsically condescending about its provincial protagonists and their travels to the sixteenth century in a Time Machine left by a traveller from the ...
Gigantes Planetarios
["Planetary Giants"] Mexican film (1965; vt Gigantes Interplanetarios; vt Planetary Giants). Estudios America/Producciones Corsa. Directed by Alfredo B Crevenna. Written by Emilio Goméz Muriel, based on a story by Alfredo Ruanova. Cast includes José Ángel "Ferrusquilla" Espinosa, Jacqueline Fellay, José Gálvez, Rogelio Guerra, Nathanael "Frankenstein" Léon, Irma Lozano, Guillermo Murray, Carlos Nieto, ...
Gibbs, Lewis
Pseudonym of UK author Joseph Walter Cove (1891-1972), whose writing career began after active service in World War One. He is now remembered mainly for his biographies, though some of his fiction is of interest. In Parable for Lovers (1934), which is Fantasy, an expatriate Englishman falls in love with a wood-nymph in Greece. In his sf novel, Late Final (1951), an Englishman parachutes into England after ...
Ultraman
Japanese tv series (1966-1967). Original title Urutoraman: Kûsô tokusatsu shirîzu; vt Ultraman: a Special Effects Fantasy Series. Created by Eiji Tsuburaya. Tsuburaya Productions. Directors include Hajime Tsuburaya, Toshihiro Iijima, Akio Jissôji and Samaji Nonagase. Writers include Tetsuo Kinjô, Mamoru Sasaki and Masahiro Yamada. Cast includes Bin Furuya, Susumu Kurobe and Masanari ...
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 ...