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
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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 ...
Crimes of the Future
Film (1970). Emergent Films. Produced, directed, written and photographed David Cronenberg. Cast includes Jon Lidolt, Jack Messinger, Ronald Mlodzik and Tania Zolty. 70 minutes. Colour. / This cheaply made, inventive Canadian film, something between an underground and a commercial movie, is chiefly of interest as ushering in – along with Stereo (1969) – Cronenberg's distinguished, eccentric and ...
Arch, E L
The pseudonym (an anagram of her first name) under which Rachel Ruth Cosgrove Payes (1922-1998), originally a research biologist, published her sf; though her first novel, a contribution to the Oz world, Hidden Valley of Oz (1951), appeared as by Rachel R Cosgrove (see Sequels by Other Hands), and her last, The Wicked Witch of Oz (1993) as by Rachel Cosgrove Payes; as well, in her later years she wrote short fiction ...
Williams, Thad W
(? -? ) US real estate dealer (in Whitefish Bay, Wisconsin), doctor (apparently medical) and author of a Lost Race tale, In Quest of Life; Or, the Revelations of the Wiyatatao of Zipantl: The Last High Priest of the Aztecs (1898), which depicts a civilization of Toltecs which practices human sacrifice, the exudate from victims melding with mysterious Underground waters to create an ...
Jackson, Geo Russell
(circa 1834-1892) Scottish-born journalist, songwriter and author, in the US from an early age; his Young Adult novel, Ambregris Island; Or, the New El Dorado (1882), flirts enticingly with the Lost Race tale – the eponymous Island contains huge quantities of ambergris and an unknown tribe – and boasts a sea serpent (see Monsters). [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 ...