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.
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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 ...
Foleÿ, Charles
(1861-1956) French author of adventure novels, some with sf elements, including Kowa la Mystérieuse (1908; trans William Frederick Harvey as Kowa the Mysterious 1909), a Yellow Peril tale set in the state of Kofa – a thin disguise for California – menaced by Chinese above the ground and below: an Invasion is being planned from an ...
Karloff, Boris
Pseudonym of UK-born actor William Henry Pratt (1887-1969), in Canada and then the US from the teens of the twentieth century; he featured in many silent films from about 1916, including Tarzan and the Golden Lion (1927) (see Tarzan Films), based on the Edgar Rice Burroughs novel; but became famous for his title role in the early sound film Frankenstein (1931) ...
Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai across the 8th Dimension, The
Film (1984). Sherwood Productions. Directed by W D Richter. Written by Earl Mac Rauch. Cast includes Ellen Barkin, Jeff Goldblum, John Lithgow, Christopher Lloyd and Peter Weller. 103 minutes. Colour. / The crazed but incoherent tale of rock-musician-neurosurgeon-particle-physicist Banzai (Weller), a kind of imaginary 1930s Pulp hero with a distinctly 1980s ambience. In this episode Banzai defeats an Alien ...
Dick, Philip K
(1928-1982) US author, one of the most important figures in twentieth-century Genre SF and an author of general significance. He is a figure who helps define by contrast those identified in this Encyclopedia as Mainstream Writers of SF: writers, that is, whose comprehension of the significant literatures of the last century has sometimes seemed less than full. An author like Thomas ...
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 ...