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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 24 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 ...
Dixon, Roger
(1930-1983) UK accountant and author whose epic adventure about humankind's future fate, Noah II (1970; rev 1975), is based on a story idea by Dixon and his agent, Basil Bova, and began the aborted Quest series. A second novel, The Cain Factor (1975) as by Charles Lewis, mixes Sex and apocalypse as a man and a woman escape a Post-Holocaust Earth to become the ...
Ransome, J Stafford
(1860-1931) UK engineer, cartoonist and author, who published under his own name, as by S R, and as by The "Blunderland" Cartoonist. He was responsible for the illustrations for, and possibly collaborated to some extent in the writing of, the Clara in Blunderland sequence of political Satires beginning with Clara in Blunderland (1902), whose main author Harold Begbie wrote here as Caroline Lewis, a joint pseudonym ...
Neeper, Cary
Working name of US microbiologist and author Carolyn A Neeper (1937- ) for her fiction, which consists primarily of the ambitious A Place Beyond Man (1975), which somewhat uneasily combines a Hard-SF rendering of the Physics and Biology of her interplanetary venues with a contemplative sweep characteristic of the Scientific Romance. ...
Turtledove, Harry
(1949- ) US author and academic who has made use of his field of scholarship (his PhD was in Byzantine history) to create all his best-known work, including several associational historical novels as by H N Turteltaub. The fantasy Videssos Cycle – The Misplaced Legion (1987), An Emperor for the Legion (1987), The Legion of Videssos (1987) and Swords of the Legion (1987), with the Krispos sequence, ...
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 ...