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.
Site updated on 20 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 ...
Glass, Philip
(1937- ) US avant-garde classical composer; Glass has been a prolific, influential and varied maker of music since the 1960s, working in minimalist and popular idioms, utilizing both electronic and more conventional orchestral media. His most distinctive works share a focus on multiply-repeated rhythmic and melodic loops, to often incantatory though always precise and solid effect. The climax of his plotless but widely noted first opera, Einstein on the Beach ...
Nichols, Robert
(1893-1944) UK poet, playwright and author whose lyrical talent did not survive the end of World War One, in which he served, becoming famous for the war poems assembled in Invocations (coll 1915 chap); from 1920 he wrote plays, verse epics and some fiction. The Smile of the Sphinx (1920 chap), a fantasy, was later revised and assembled in ...
Achilleos, Chris
(1947-2021) Working name of British artist Christos Achilléos, born in Famagusta, Cyprus; he moved to Britain at the age of twelve after his father died. After graduating from the Hornsey College of Art in 1969, Achilleos began receiving assignments to do book covers for British publishers; his covers for reprints of Edgar Rice Burroughs's Pellucidar novels were very unremarkable, but he displayed more creativity in works like his 1972 ...
Supertrain
US tv series (1979). Dan Curtis Productions/National Broadcasting Company for NBC-TV. Created by Earl W Wallace and Donald E Westlake. Produced by Rod Amateau. Directors included Amateau, Cliff Bole, Barry Crane. Writers included Stephen Kandel, Brad Radnitz, Westlake. Cast includes Robert Alda, Edward Andrews, Harrison Page and Nita Talbot. One two-hour pilot film plus seven 60-minute episodes. Colour. / The Supertrain is a nuclear-powered ...
Robinson, Roger
(1943- ) UK computer programmer, bibliographer and publisher, active in UK Fandom for many years. The Writings of Henry Kenneth Bulmer (1983 chap; rev 1984 chap) is an exhaustive Bibliography of one of the most prolific sf writers, Kenneth Bulmer, and Who's Hugh?: An SF Reader's Guide to Pseudonyms (1987) is similarly exhaustive in its ...