SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Tuesday 21 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: The Telluride Institute
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 ...
Ehrlich, Paul R
(1932- ) US academic and author of The Population Bomb (1968), an influential – though often described as alarmist – text which predicts Disaster as a result of Overpopulation. Various gloomy Predictions about damage to Ecology are fictionalized in his short "Eco-Catastrophe!" (September 1969 Ramparts). ...
Gull, Cyril Ranger
Working name of UK journalist and author Arthur Edward Ranger Gull (1875-1923) who added Cyril to his name at the beginning of his career; moderately prolific under his own name, though he was also well-known under his pseudonym Guy Thorne; he began to publish sf with "The Automaton" in The Ludgate for January 1900 with Reginald Bacchus (1874-1945), one of whose later romans à clef features an identifiable Gull in scandalous situations. It may be because he did indeed lead ...
Fischer, P J
(? - ) US author whose first novel Julia and the Dream Maker (2003) – first of a projected series – follows three young experimenters whose discoveries lead to AI and portals into other worlds. [JC]
Lee, Mary Soon
(1965- ) UK-born author and poet with an MA in mathematics from Cambridge University; currently in the US as a naturalized citizen. She began to publish work of genre interest with "Gift" in Strange Days magazine for Fall 1992. Her first book-length publication was the fantasy collection Winter Shadows and Other Tales (coll 2001), followed by the sf collection Ebb Tides and Other Tales (coll 2002); the latter includes work first ...
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 ...