SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Sunday 26 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 ...
Time Viewer
A passive form of Time Machine which typically displays, but allows no interaction with, scenes from the past. Almost certainly the first clearly envisioned example of the device appears in "L'historioscope" (in Fantaisies, coll 1883; trans Brian Stableford in News from the Moon, anth 2007, as "The Historioscope") by Eugène Mouton, where an electrical ...
Mills, Robert P
(1920-1986) US editor and literary agent, managing editor of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction from its inception. His only published story was "The Last Shall be First" in that magazine's August 1958 issue. He assumed the editorship proper a month later with the September 1958 issue, following Anthony Boucher's resignation; he remained editor until March 1962 and continued thereafter in the role of consulting editor ...
McDermott, Joe M
(1979- ) US author who initially published as J M McDermott, though he has tended to use his full name since 2014. He began publishing work of genre interest with "I Am Nature" in Pseudopod for December 2007. Most of his output is fantasy, including the Dogsland Trilogy beginning with Never Knew Another (2011), which is set in a patched-together fantasy environment (with Werewolves, demons, autobiographical skulls ...
Science Fiction Review (Monthly), The
Digest-sized semiprofessional critical Magazine (see Semiprozine) published by Bran Dougal. Edited by Martin Last, with Baird Searles and Don Yee as associate editors. Twenty monthly issues, March 1975 to October 1976, with #17/#18 for July/August 1976 being a double issue. / The first issue was titled The Science Fiction Review and featured reviews by all three ...
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 ...