SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Sunday 19 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 ...
Glenn, Harper
(? - ) US author whose first novel, the Young Adult Monarch Rising (2022), set in a declining Dystopian version of Near Future America, follows the hegira of its young protagonist Jo Monarch as she leaves the isolated Southern hinterlands of her birth and begins to discover wider truths about the world beyond the Ashes, and about love. [JC]
Purple Monster Strikes, The
US Serial Film (1945; cut vt D-Day on Mars 1966). Republic Pictures. Produced by Ronald Davidson. Directed by Spencer Gordon Bennett and Fred C Brannon. Written by Royal Cole, Albert DeMond, Basil Dickey, Lynne Perkins, Joseph Poland, and Barney Sarecky. Cast includes Roy Barcroft, James Craven, John Davidson, Bud Geary, Dennis Moore and Linda Stirling. 15 chapters, 201 minutes total. Cut to 100 minutes for television. Black and white. / From ...
Soane, John
(1753-1837) UK architect and author, active in the first capacity from the early 1770;, now perhaps best known for his forty-five years with the Bank of England, for which he served as architect and builder of its paradigm headquarters (demolished in the twentieth century). Along with earlier paintings by Joseph Gandy (1771-1843), he commissioned "A Bird's-eye View of the Bank of England" (1830), which depicts the bank in ruins at some point in the moderately distant future (see ...
Walker, Rowland
(1876-1947) UK author of tales for boys. The Antihero of The Phantom Airman (1920) is a German airman unreconciled to the outcome of World War One, who establishes a pirate band whose depredations are made possible by a secret Invention; By Airship to the Tropics: The Amazing Adventures of Two Schoolboys (1923) unthreateningly deposits its protagonists in a ...
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 ...