SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Wednesday 22 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
Sponsor of the day: Conversation 2023
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 ...
Ex Machina [film]
Film (2015). DNA Films, Film4. Directed and written by Alex Garland. Cast includes Domhnall Gleeson, Oscar Isaac, Corey Johnson, Sonoya Mizuno, Alicia Vikander. 108 minutes. Colour. / Young Computer programmer Caleb (Gleeson) works for Bluebook, the world's leading search engine firm; the name derives at least in part from The Blue & Brown Books (1958) by Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951), where the ...
Jules Verne's Rocket to the Moon
Film (1967; vt Those Fantastic Flying Fools US; vt Rocket to the Moon). Jules Verne Films, Ltd, Warner-Pathé UK, American International Pictures US. Produced by Harry Alan Towers. Directed by Don Sharp. Written by Dave Freeman from an original story by Towers (credited as Peter Welbeck), very loosely based on De la terre a lune (1865) and Autour de la lune (1870) by Jules ...
Cockroft, W P
(1909-1992) UK author who began publishing work of genre interest with They Came from Mars (28 April 1934 Scoops as "Cataclysm", anon; circa 1945 chap), which with its sequel, "City of Mars" (16 June 1934 Scoops), depicts an Earth prostrated by a Martian plague, the destruction of London, and the eventual accommodation between the two races. [JC] see also: ...
Space Flight
Flight into space is the classic theme in sf. The lunar romances of Francis Godwin, Cyrano de Bergerac et al. are the works most commonly and readily identified as Proto SF. In modern times, as Genre SF spilled out of print into the Cinema, Radio and Television, ...
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 ...