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Sunday 26 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 ...
Wetanson, Burt
Working name of US screenwriter and author Burton R Wetanson (1934- ), who collaborated with Thomas Hoobler (who see for details) on the Hunters sequence comprising The Hunters (1978) and The Treasure Hunters (1983). [JC]
Monster on the Campus
Film (1958). Universal. Directed by Jack Arnold. Written by David Duncan. Cast includes Troy Donahue, Arthur Franz, Joanna Moore and Judson Pratt. 77 minutes. Black and white. / This is one of Jack Arnold's last and poorest sf films, a variation on the Jekyll and Hyde theme: blood from a specimen coelacanth causes living creatures to devolve (see Devolution); a ...
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
Film (1977). Columbia. Directed by Steven Spielberg. Script credited to Spielberg but early draft actually written by Paul Schrader (1946- ), who disagreed with Spielberg over the treatment of his script and withdrew his name from the project. Cast includes Bob Balaban, Melinda Dillon, Richard Dreyfuss, Teri Garr, Cary Guffey and François Truffaut. 135 minutes. Colour. / After Star Wars ...
Newton, J H
(? -? ) UK author of The Aztec Treasure (1936), a Lost Race tale describing the 300-year-long rule of an Aztec king over Zombies on an Island off South America. [JC]
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 ...