SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Sunday 26 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 ...
Charbonneau, Joelle
(1974- ) US author almost exclusively of work for Young Adult audiences, her early series being nonfantastic. She is initially of sf interest for the Testing Trilogy beginning with The Testing Guide (1 April 2013 Tor.com; 2013 ebook) and The Testing (2013), set in a savagely devastated Near Future world whose only hope may reside in those ...
Johnson, Annabel
(1921-2013) US author, mostly of Young Adult novels beginning in 1956, about half of them in collaboration with her husband, Edgar Johnson, who is not to be confused with Edgar Johnson (1901-1972), an earlier novelist. Of sf interest, all written with Johnson, are An Alien Music (1982); The Danger Quotient (1984), set initially in a Ruined Earth 130 years after ...
Peirce, Hayford
(1942-2020) US author, in Tahiti for the most active decades of his career, who also wrote crime thrillers; he began publishing sf with "Unlimited Warfare" in Analog for November 1974 and established a name for lightly written tales whose backgrounds were unusually well conceived. "Mail Supremacy" (March 1975 Analog) begins a series of tales – much later assembled as Chap Foey Rider: Capitalist to the Stars (coll 2001) ...
Hekking, Avis
(1878-1945) US author – she may have been born while her parents were temporarily in Europe – resident in UK at some point, perhaps permanently; of her works, A King of Mars (1908) is of interest for its depiction of life on Mars, which is moderately advanced; Communications are soon established between Mars and Earth, via a small globe which contains messages variously conveyed. Hekking may have returned to ...
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 ...