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Saturday 18 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 ...
Halloween III: Season of the Witch
Film (1983). Dino De Laurentiis. Produced by Debra Hill, John Carpenter. Directed by Tommy Lee Wallace. Written by Wallace (but primarily by Nigel Kneale, uncredited). Cast includes Tom Atkins, Stacey Nelkin and Dan O'Herlihy. 98 minutes. Colour. / Not at all a true sequel to the "stalk and slash" Halloween films, this is a horror film with an sf rationale. Crazed Irish entrepreneur Cochran (O'Herlihy), ...
Cole, Ira A
(1883-1973) US author of a Lost Race novel, Ibe of Atlan (1947), set in nineteenth-century Colorado, where an advanced civilization is found living in secret. Cole corresponded with H P Lovecraft and others in a round-robin discussion entitled "The Kleicomolo". [JC]
Racina, Thom
Working name of US author Thomas Frank Raucina (1946- ), extremely prolific under various names at the beginning of his career (Racina states that he published 157 books under various pseudonyms before his first acknowledged title), some of this output being soft pornography, though there is nothing (apparently) of genre interest; mostly during the 1980s, he also wrote for a number of television serials, some of them high-rating soap operas. His first signed book, ...
Leyner, Mark
(1956- ) US author who began to publish work of genre interest with "I Was an Infinitely Hot and Dense Dot" in Mississippi Review 1988, and whose spoofish, very mildly Satirical extravaganzas aroused in the 1990s a sense that he had gained some metafictional insight into the raree-show of America (see Absurdist SF; Fabulation), perhaps like Donald ...
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 ...