SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Saturday 25 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 ...
Belove, B
(1880-1969) Russian-born physician and author, seemingly in US from an early age. His only novel, The Split Atom: Last Human Pair on Earth, the Whirling of Ideas (1946), presents an allegorical vision of the course of human and divine history, as told to a new godling by its parents; after various rewritings of history, and disquisitions on unrelated topics, the tale climaxes in the nuclear destruction of Earth (see End of the World), with the ...
Holgate, Jerome B
(1812-1893) US author of A Sojourn in the City of Amalgamation in the Year of Our Lord 19— (1835), a self-published Dystopia set in a Near Future City in Upstate New York where miscegenation is legally enforced, over against every decent instinct of whites, who (Holgate's anti-Abolitionist venom must have seemed grotesque even in 1835) faint at the smell of Blacks. ...
Stevermer, Caroline
(1955- ) US journalist and author whose fiction has been almost exclusively restricted to fantasy [see her entry in The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below], though she began her writing career with the Nicholas Coffin series of medieval mysteries, starting with The Alchemist: Death of a Borgia (1981) as C J Stevermer. Of sf interest is River Rats (1992), a ...
Tepperman, Emile C
(1899-1951) US insurance broker and author, active in the 1930s and 1940s under his own name, beginning with "Satan's Scalpel" for Secret Agent "X" in March 1934, a Pulp magazine for which he also wrote several longer stories under the house name Brant House. He contributed several book-length instalments to the long Spider sequence of sf-inflected stories (see The ...
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 ...