SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Monday 20 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 ...
Aliens Are Coming, The
US made-for-TV film (1980). Quinn Martin Productions for NBC-TV. Executive producer Philip Saltzman. Directed by Harvey Hart. Written by Robert W Linski. Cast includes Eric Braeden, Melinda O Fee, Max Gail and Tom Mason. 100 minutes, later cut to 90 minutes. Colour. / From his research facility, astrophysicist Dr Scott Dryden (Mason) tracks an Spaceship descending to the Nevada desert; this proves to contain hostile Aliens ...
Crouch, Blake
(1978- ) US screenwriter and author whose earlier work, like his first novel Desert Places (2004), combined thriller and horror modes, though only with hints of the fantastic. He is perhaps best known for the Wayward Pines sequence comprising Pines (2012), Wayward (2013) and The Last Town (2014), made into the Television series Wayward Pines (2015-2016) produced by ...
Silver Streak Comics
US Comic (1939-1942; 1946). Your Guide Publications Inc, New Friday Publications Inc, Comic House Inc. 23 issues. Artists include Jack Binder, Dick Briefer, Don Rico and Bob Wood. Script writers include Otto Binder (see Eando Binder), Dick Briefer, Leslie Charteris, Carl Formes, Don Rico and Dick Wood. 68 pages per issue (fewer in #22 and #23), usually with 7-9 long ...
Iconoclasm
An essential part of sf is change; indeed it may be said that the belief that the circumstances of human life were bound to keep on changing provided the most powerful stimulus for the creation of the genre. Nevertheless, it is obvious from experience that all changes, technical or social, encounter resistance ranging from the perfunctory to the desperate, as a result of human inertia. Much sf, then, is concerned with the nature of that resistance, its unexpected force, the most efficacious ...
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 ...