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Wednesday 22 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 ...
Perils of Gwendoline in the Land of the Yik-Yak, The
French film (1984; vt Gwendoline). Parafrance Films. Written and directed by Just Jaeckin, based on the Comic The Adventures of Sweet Gwendoline by John Willie. Cast includes Brent Huff, Tawny Kitaen, Bernadette Lafont, Jean Rougerie and Zabou. 106 minutes, cut to 87 minutes for US release. Colour. / Mercenary Willard (Huff) rescues Gwendoline (Kitaen) and her maid Beth (Zabou) from ...
Gallun, Raymond Z
(1911-1994) US author and technical writer, born and educated in Wisconsin, a considerable traveller in later years. He began publishing sf stories at the age of eighteen in November 1929, with "The Space Dwellers" in Wonder Stories and "The Crystal Ray" in Air Wonder Stories. In the 1930s he made a 1932 contribution to Hugo Gernsback's ...
Unreal
Videogame (1998). Epic Games (EG). Designed by Cliff Bleszinski, James Schmalz. Platforms: Win (1998); Mac (1999). / The Unreal series of First Person Shooters is a competitor to Quake (1996) and its various descendants, and has generally shared its rival's philosophy, with similar gameplay and atmosphere. The two series compete not only as game experiences but ...
Mundy, Talbot
Pseudonym of UK-born author William Lancaster Gribbon (1879-1940), who emigrated to the USA in 1909 after his early life as a confidence man, ivory poacher and all-round rogue in India and British Africa had culminated in the threat – not in the event realized – of a prison sentence. He soon became a professional author, with most of his work first appearing in Adventure magazine, where he became the star writer; after 1935 he left ...
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 ...