SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Friday 24 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 ...
Collins, Max Allan
(1948- ) US author, best known for mysteries and thrillers, many written as Max Collins; under that form of his name he also wrote the Dick Tracy comic strip from 1977 to 1993, assembling a good deal of this output – much of which features sf-like Inventions and Villains with assorted Superpowers – in graphic collections like ...
Burgess, Anthony
Working name of UK composer and author John Anthony Burgess Wilson (1917-1993), known primarily for his work outside the sf field; as a composer he worked under his full name. Trained in English literature and phonetics, Burgess taught at home and in Malaysia 1946-1960, then returned to the UK (though later moved to Monaco) and became a full-time Protean man of letters, novelist, musician, composer and specialist in Shakespeare and James Joyce. ...
Le Prêtre, William
Pseudonym of UK chaplain, tutor and lecturer the Rev William Hendy Cock (1873-1938), author of the Near Future sf novel, The Bolshevik (1931), in which the Bolsheviks have created a Dystopian rule over France and Britain; an uprising ensues. [JC]
Infinite Matrix, The
US professional cumulative Online Magazine which posted material daily but was archived monthly. It was published by Eileen Gunn and ran, after what could have been its only issue in August 2001, from November 2001 to January 2006, with three additional issues in April 2006, January 2007 and July 2008. Along with Sci Fiction and Strange Horizons, both of ...
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 ...