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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.
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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 ...
Near Future
Images of the near future in sf differ markedly from those of the Far Future in both content and attitude. The far future tends to be associated with notions of ultimate destiny, and is dominated by metaphors of senescence; its images display a world irrevocably transfigured. It is viewed from a detached viewpoint; the dominant mood is – paradoxically – one of nostalgia, because the far future, like the dead past, can be entered only imaginatively, and ...
Enemy Mine
Film (1985). Kings Road Entertainment/Twentieth Century Fox. Directed by Wolfgang Petersen. Written by Edward Khmara, based on Enemy Mine (September 1979 Asimov's; 1989 chap dos) by Barry B Longyear. Cast includes Louis Gossett Jr and Dennis Quaid. 108 minutes, cut to 93 minutes. Colour. / During a space battle between humans and the reptilian (and hermaphroditic) Dracs, two pilots, one from each ...
Flackes, B
Working name of Irish author William David Flackes (1921-1993), who spent much of his career as a journalist reporting on Irish matters; he received the OBE (Order of the British Empire) in 1981. His sf was an early sideline, and not of much interest. It includes (almost certainly) two Space Operas as by Clem Macartney: Ten Years to Oblivion (1951) and Dark Side of Venus (1951), and, under his own name, Duel in Nightmare Worlds ...
Pinsker, Sarah
(1977- ) US singer-songwriter and author, who began to publish work of genre interest with "Not Dying in Central Texas" in Nine for June 2012. She initially published only in shorter forms, though prolifically, with more than 50 stories released by 2019. "In Joy, Knowing the Abyss" (1-8 July 2013 Strange Horizons) won a Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award. She may be best known ...
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 ...