SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Sunday 19 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 17 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 ...
Rollins, Frank West
(1860-1915) US lawyer, banker, politician and author whose Break O'Day Tales (coll 1894) includes "The Steam Interlude", a reminiscence from 1945 of the worldwide Disaster in 1905 when water no longer turns to steam, threatening to end civilization. [JC]
Weis, Margaret
(1948- ) US author and games publisher best known for Fantasy series [not listed below], in particular the extensive Dragonlance sequence of Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Role Playing Game-based Ties beginning with Dragons of Autumn Twilight (1984) with Tracy Hickman (1955- ). Of sf interest are two short linked series of ...
Mihalik, Jessie
(? - ) US software engineer and author who has specialized in broad-gauge Space Operas with romance elements, female protagonists who may be princesses caught up in the kind of intrigues that normally roust Galactic Empires. Examples are the Rogue Queen sequence beginning with The Queen's Gambit (2018), featuring a queen who must win a War ...
Ogilvy, Arthur James
(1834-1914) Indian-born civil servant and author, educated in the UK, in Australia from 1851, most of whose work is nonfiction, some of it studies of Evolution. Of sf interest is The Ape Man (1913 chap) as by A J O, in which a prospector discovers the last survivors of a tribe of quasi-human apes (see Apes as Human) in the Amazon, and lives with them. [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 ...