SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Friday 24 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 24 January 2025
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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 ...
Straczynski, J Michael
(1954- ) US Television producer, playwright, journalist and author, who began to publish work of genre interest with "A Last Testament for Nick and the Trooper" in Shadows 6 (anth 1983) edited by Charles L Grant; his first novel, Demon Night (1988), like most of his fiction not connected to his television work, has been horror; further titles include OtherSyde ...
Crowens, Elizabeth
Pseudonym of an unidentified US journalist and author (? - ) who is of sf interest for the Time Traveler Professor sequence, beginning with Silent Meridian (2016). Set primarily in a Steampunk-inflected late-nineteenth-century Britain, it focuses on Arthur Conan Doyle, whose obsession in later life with spiritualism has been repurposed into this context. He and the ...
Greenwood Press
US specialist publishing house founded in 1967, based in Westport, Connecticut, whose books were largely academic and sometimes bibliographical; it took a special interest in sf, and was one of the major academic publishers in this area. Among the commentaries on sf published by Greenwood Press are Martha A Bartter's The Way to Ground Zero: The Atomic Bomb in American Science Fiction (1988), Thomas D ...
Lewis, De Witt
(1864-1932) US handyman, farmer, postmaster and author of one sf novel, A Trip to the North Pole and Beyond to Civilization (1912), in which Arctic explorers discover a Lost World containing survivors of Atlantis, who have established a socialist Utopia which benignly controls property in order to enhance production. [JC]
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 ...