SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Monday 20 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 17 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 ...
Body Snatchers
Film (1993). Warner Bros. Directed by Abel Ferrara. Written Stuart Gordon, Dennis Paoli and Nicholas St John, based on a story by Raymond Cistheri and Larry Cohen, based loosely in turn on the 1958 screenplay. Cast includes Gabrielle Anwar, Terry Kinney, Meg Tilly, Forest Whitaker and Billy Wirth. 87 minutes. Colour. / This low-budget remake (the second remake, the first being in 1978) of ...
Phillips, Helen
(1981- ) US author who began to publish work of genre interest with "The Joined" in The Mississippi Review for Spring 2008. Much of her short fiction, fabulistic and conversant with (though not perhaps deeply penetrating) the toolkit of Fantastika, has been assembled in And Yet They Were Happy (coll 2011) and Some Possible Solutions (coll 2016). Her first novel, The Beautiful Bureaucrat ...
Robertson, Dale
(? - ) US author known only for The Son of the Phantom (1944), a Tie to the Comic The Phantom scripted by Lee Falk. The novel is based on the 1944-1945 newspaper storyline "The Childhood of the Phantom", telling of the young Phantom's jungle childhood, US education, and return to Africa to inherit the crime-fighting role of ...
Scream and Scream Again
Film (1969). Amicus, American International Pictures. Directed by Gordon Hessler. Written by Christopher Wicking, based on The Disorientated Man (1966; vt Scream and Scream Again 1967) by Peter Saxon. Cast includes Michael Gothard, Christopher Lee, Alfred Marks and Vincent Price. 94 minutes. Colour. / This blend of policier, cold-war political thriller, ...
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 ...