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 ...
Borges, Jorge Luis
(1899-1986) Argentine poet, essayist, librarian and short-story author, a central figure of Latin American literature for the sixty years of his active career, which he pursued solely in Argentina, though he was partly raised in Switzerland and took his university degree there; his influence extended through poetry; very numerous reviews and seminal essays, which covered almost all of Western literature; as well as his fiction. ...
British Fantasy Society
1. The first British Fantasy Society was sf-based and operated from 1942 to 1946. It was a precursor of the British Science Fiction Association founded in 1958: see this entry for further details. The Society's British Fantasy Society Bulletin (which see) was circulated with Futurian War Digest. / links / ...
Morris, Alfred
(? -? ) UK author whose Near Future Satire, Looking Ahead!: A Tale of Adventure (Not by the Author of "Looking Backward") (1892) anonymous, conveys its anti-Edward Bellamy and anti-socialist argument through a Robinsonade plot which involves its young protagonist, shipwrecked with his crew on a desert ...
D'Argenteuil, Paul
Pseudonym of the unidentified US author (? -? ) of The Trembling of Borealis (1899), set in America after a war with Cuba and featuring a revolt of the working classes which brings about a welfare state and the disenfranchisement of Blacks. Given the socialist – albeit racist – bent of the tale (see Politics; Race in SF), the author's Pseudonym ...
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 ...