SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Sunday 19 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: Andy Richards of Cold Tonnage Books
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 ...
Ames, Mildred
(1919-1994) US author of novels for older children, a few of them fantasy. Of sf interest is Is There Life on a Plastic Planet? (1975), which effectively transforms the Paranoid theme of substitution – in this case a shop contains dolls identical to the young women its owner attempts to suborn – into a resonant tale of adolescence and identity. Questions of identity also lie at the heart of Anna to the Infinite Power (1981), ...
Womack, Marian
(1975- ) Spanish translator, editor and author, married to James Womack, now mostly resident in the UK. She writes Gothic, weird and sf tales in both Spanish and English and teaches in the Oxford University writing programme. She has contributed to important Anthologies, such as The Best of Spanish Steampunk (anth 2015), which she ...
Yu, Charles
(1976- ) US lawyer and author who began publishing work of genre interest with "Third Class Superhero" and other stories assembled as Third Class Superhero (coll 2006), none of these tales having been previously published; several stories in his second collection, Sorry Please Thank You: Stories (coll 2012), appeared previously in journals, including the impressive "Standard Loneliness Package" (November 2010 ...
Montag, Kassandra
(? - ) US poet and author whose first novel, the moderately distant Near Future After the Flood (2019), focuses on the quest of a mother for her long-abducted daughter Rowena. In a world of catastrophic Climate Change, with America transformed by vastly rising seas into an extended Archipelago, with former mountains now serving as ...
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 ...