SF Encyclopedia Home Page
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.
Site updated on 20 January 2025
Sponsor of the day: Conversation 2023
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 ...
Howgego, Raymond John
(1946- ) UK traveller and author whose studies of explorations and excursions have culminated in the Encyclopedia of Exploration sequence beginning with Encyclopedia of Exploration to 1800 (2003), with 5,000+ entries in 4,000,000 words. The scope of the final volume of the series is revealed in its full title, ...
Moore, Nancy Jane
(? - ) US lawyer and author who began publishing work of genre interest with "Change of Command" in Sword and Sorceress VI (anth 1990) edited by Marion Zimmer Bradley, with much of her early work being fantasy of an increasingly demanding nature, as demonstrated by the strong stories assembled in Conscientious Inconsistencies (coll 2008 chap). Changeling (2004 chap) ...
Balmer, Edwin
(1883-1959) US author and editor, trained as an engineer, who wrote in a variety of genres and edited (1927-1949) the magazine Red Book, which occasionally published sf; his first novel, Waylaid by Wireless: A Suspicion, a Warning, a Sporting Proposition, and a Transatlantic Pursuit (1909), verges on sf; more interestingly, with his brother-in-law William MacHarg, he soon published The Achievements of Luther Trant (coll ...
Man from Planet X, The
Film (1951). Mid-Century Films. Directed by Edgar G Ulmer. Written by Aubrey Wisberg and Jack Pollexfen. Cast includes Raymond Bond, Robert Clarke, Margaret Field and William Schallert. 70 minutes. Black and white. / As the wandering Planet X approaches Earth, an Alien (actor unknown and uncredited) from the planet lands his Spaceship at the place where his world will come closest to Earth, in rural Scotland. This location ...
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 ...